CLASSICAL CIVILISATION

The Origin of Sacrifice

The myth of Prometheus belongs primarily to the Greek tradition, though it passed into Roman consciousness through the broad cultural inheritance of Hellenism and was treated by Latin authors as continuous with their own religious understanding. The most authoritative ancient accounts are Hesiod’s Theogony (c. 700 BC) and Works and Days (c. 700 BC), supplemented by Aeschylus’s tragic drama Prometheus Bound (c. 460 BC) and the mythographical compendium of Apollodorus (c. 1st–2nd century AD). Together, these sources construct a figure of extraordinary complexity: benefactor, trickster, rebel, and sufferer.

*Torture of Prometheus by Salvator Rosa, 1646-1648

Before humanity came to exist, a great war was fought between the Olympian gods and the Titans. Many Titans were defeated, killed, or cast into Tartarus, the deepest abyss of the Underworld. Prometheus, a Titan whose very name — from the Greek promētheia — implied the capacity to think ahead or see into the future, chose to fight alongside Zeus and the Olympians rather than with his own kin. Hesiod does not linger on this decision in the Theogony, but its implications were significant: it positioned Prometheus as an anomaly among the Titans, one whose loyalty ran not to blood but to intelligence and foresight. His brother Epimetheus, whose name means “afterthought,” fought alongside him. According to Apollodorus (Library 1.7.1), Zeus rewarded the two brothers by entrusting them with the task of creating all living things and equipping them with the means of survival.

*The Battle Between the Gods and the Giants by Joachim Wtewael, 1608

Epimetheus was charged with distributing qualities and capacities among the creatures. As Plato records in the Protagoras (320c–321c) — in a passage widely understood to draw on an older mythic tradition — Epimetheus gave to some creatures speed, to others strength; some he clothed in fur, others in shells or feathers; some he made capable of flight, others of swimming or swift running through the earth. Prometheus undertook the fashioning of human beings themselves, moulding them upright from clay and water in imitation of the gods. Aeschylus, in Prometheus Bound, has Prometheus speak with great pride of his gifts to humanity: “I gave them fire; I gave them understanding” (ll. 252–254). Hesiod, by contrast, implies a more troubled relationship between creator and creation, placing the origins of human suffering squarely within the divine dispensation — or rather, its deliberate restriction.

*Roman fresco depicting Prometheus creating man in the presence of Athena, 3rd century AD

Zeus, dissatisfied with the prospect of mortals who too closely resembled the gods, intervened. He did not wish humanity to enjoy parity with the divine order; he wanted mortals to be vulnerable, dependent, and aware of their dependence. As Hesiod makes clear in Works and Days (ll. 42–105), the condition of toil and want that defines human life is no accident of nature but a deliberate act of divine will. Prometheus, however, was committed to a different vision — one in which his creatures would occupy a distinct but dignified position in the order of things.

*Prometheus Carrying Fire by Jan Cossiers, 1636-1638

The first great confrontation between Prometheus and Zeus unfolded at Mecone, a site described by Hesiod in the Theogony (ll. 535–541) as the place where gods and men first met to divide the sacrificial portions that would henceforth govern all religious ritual. Prometheus slaughtered a great ox and divided its substance into two portions. In one, he concealed the edible flesh and fat-wrapped entrails beneath the ox’s unappealing stomach lining. In the other, he arranged the white bones — useless as food — beneath a gleaming layer of rich fat, making them appear the more desirable portion. Hesiod is explicit that Zeus was not genuinely deceived; he saw through the trick (Theogony, ll. 550–552: “he knew the deception and did not fail to recognise it”). Yet he chose the bones regardless, either to complete the arrangement that would thereafter bind mortal sacrificial practice, or to furnish himself with a pretext for punishing mankind. What the episode established, in any case, was the sacrificial economy of the ancient world: humans would consume the meat of the animal and offer to the gods the bones and fat, reduced to smoke on the altar. As Hesiod puts it, “since then the tribes of men upon the earth burn white bones to the immortals on the smoky altars” (Theogony, ll. 556–557). The distribution was not merely practical; it was cosmological, encoding in every act of sacrifice the fundamental difference between mortal need and divine sufficiency.

Enraged — whether genuinely or performatively — Zeus responded to the deception at Mecone by withholding fire from humanity. Hesiod states plainly in Works and Days (l. 42) that Zeus “hid fire” from mortal men, making clear that fire had been available before and was now deliberately removed as a punishment. Without fire, humans could not cook meat — the very portion the trick at Mecone had secured for them — nor could they forge tools, heat their homes, or advance beyond the animal condition. Prometheus was unwilling to accept this. According to Hesiod (Theogony, ll. 566–569), he ascended to Olympus and stole fire from the gods, hiding it in the hollow stem of a fennel plant — the narthex — and carrying it down to mankind. Aeschylus amplifies this moment considerably: in Prometheus Bound, the titan recounts that he “looked upon the gift of fire” as the source of every art and every human achievement (ll. 252–254), and the chorus acknowledges that without it, civilisation would have been impossible. Fire enabled not only cooking and warmth but metallurgy, architecture, seafaring, and warfare — in Aeschylus’s formulation, it was the enabling condition of all technē, all human skill and craft.

*marble fragment depicting Prometheus modelling the first man, 185 AD

Zeus’s retaliation was swift and double-pronged. His first act was the creation of Pandora, the first woman, fashioned by Hephaistos from clay at Zeus’s instruction and adorned by the gods with beauty, grace, and the dangerous gift of speech. Hesiod describes her creation in both the Theogony (ll. 570–616) and Works and Days (ll. 60–105), where she is explicitly called “a beautiful evil” (kalon kakon) — a trap disguised as a gift. She was sent to Epimetheus, not Prometheus himself, though Hesiod notes in Works and Days (l. 86) that Prometheus had warned his brother never to accept a gift from Zeus. Epimetheus, true to his name, failed to think ahead and accepted her. With her came a great jar — not, as the later tradition often has it, a box, a confusion introduced by Erasmus’s translation — containing all the evils, diseases, and hardships of the world. When the lid was removed, these afflictions scattered among humanity, and only Hope (Elpis) remained trapped inside. Hesiod’s account in Works and Days (ll. 94–98) is deliberately ambiguous about whether Hope is humanity’s comfort or a final cruelty — the question has occupied scholars since antiquity.

*red-figure calyx krater depicting the creation of Pandora, attributed to The Niobid Painter, 460-450 BC

Zeus’s punishment of Prometheus himself was savage and intended to be eternal. As Hesiod records in the Theogony (ll. 521–525), and as Aeschylus dramatises at length in Prometheus Bound, the Titan was bound in unbreakable chains — Hesiod specifies bonds of bronze — to a great pillar or rock, his body exposed to the sky. Each day an eagle (not a vulture, as later retellings sometimes suggest; Hesiod and Aeschylus are both clear on this point — Theogony, l. 524) descended to tear at his liver, consuming it; each night the liver regenerated, and the torment began again. The eagle, as Zeus’s sacred bird, makes the punishment specifically and cruelly personal — it is the king of the gods’ own creature that enacts the daily torture. Aeschylus’s Prometheus, nailed to his crag at the opening of the drama, refuses to repent; his defiance is total. “I knew what I was doing,” he declares. “I sinned — I admit it — willingly” (Prometheus Bound, ll. 266–267). This intransigence — choosing suffering over submission — is the core of Aeschylus’s portrait of the Titan.

*marble relief depicting the punishment of Prometheus, 3rd century AD

The release of Prometheus was eventually accomplished by Heracles (Hercules in the Roman tradition). Hesiod acknowledges it briefly in the Theogony (ll. 526–531), noting that Zeus permitted his son to free the Titan in order to bring glory to Heracles; Apollodorus (Library 2.5.11) places the liberation during Heracles’ quest for the apples of the Hesperides — the eleventh labour in his account, not the final one — when Heracles shot the eagle and broke Prometheus’s chains. Despite the suffering he had endured across immeasurable ages, Prometheus expressed no regret for his actions. It is precisely this quality — the willingness to absorb infinite punishment in defence of a conviction — that rendered him so potent a figure in the ancient imagination.

*Prometheus Unbound by Carl Bloch

The trick Prometheus performed at Mecone, then, was far more than a clever swindle. As Hesiod presents it, the episode is foundational: it establishes the sacrificial contract that would become the cornerstone of all Greek and, by extension, Roman religious practice. Every animal sacrifice performed in antiquity — and they were performed in enormous numbers, at every temple, festival, and civic occasion — reenacted the original division at Mecone. The gods received bones and fat reduced to fragrant smoke; humans received the nourishing flesh. This distribution was not read as a slight upon the gods but as an acknowledgement of essential difference: the gods, as Hesiod implies and as later commentators elaborated, did not require nourishment in the way mortals did. They subsisted on ambrosia and nectar; the smoke of sacrifice was a tribute and an olfactory pleasure, not a dietary necessity. Humans, by contrast, were defined precisely by their need — their bodies required sustenance, and the consumption of sacrificial meat was simultaneously nutritional and ritual, binding the mortal world to the divine through shared participation in the same event.

*Sacrifice to the Genius Augusti, built approx. 62 AD, at the Temple of Vespasian in Pompeii, Italy

The hierarchical logic embedded in this arrangement is crucial. Sacrifice maintained the separation between gods and mortals — it was the act through which the boundary between the two orders was both acknowledged and ritually traversed. By giving to the gods what humans could not eat, and eating what the gods did not need, the sacrificial ceremony enshrined the asymmetry of the divine and human conditions while preserving a reciprocal relationship between them. The gods required honour and recognition; humans required protection, fertility, and divine favour. Sacrifice was the medium through which this exchange was conducted.

Prometheus sits at the origin of this whole arrangement — as its architect, its subverter, and ultimately its martyr. His foresight led him to see, before the division at Mecone and the theft of fire had run their course, that humanity’s survival and dignity depended not merely on divine patronage but on the possession of resources that enabled self-sufficiency. Fire is, in the ancient scheme, the emblem of technē — the capacity to transform the raw materials of nature into something useful, beautiful, or terrible. It is what distinguishes the human condition from the animal. In handing it to mortals, Prometheus did not defy the gods out of contempt but out of a vision of what humanity could become. That vision, and the terrible price he paid for it, made him one of the most enduring figures in the ancient world — and one whose significance has never ceased to resonate.

Water Supply and Sanitation in Ancient Rome

The maintenance of a clean and abundant water supply was, for the Romans, no mere civic convenience but a matter of fundamental importance — a prerequisite, they believed, for the health, stability, and prosperity of the state itself. It is tempting, from a modern vantage point, to dismiss ancient approaches to sanitation as rudimentary or negligible; contemporary societies, accustomed as many are to the assumption of safe running water, may project that complacency backwards onto the ancient world, presuming that such standards were either unattainable or simply unimagined. Such an assumption, though understandable, does a significant disservice to one of antiquity’s most technically accomplished civilisations.

*Ancient Rome by Giovanni Paolo Panini, 1754-1759

Rome was, in the truest sense of the word, a revolutionary civilisation — one distinguished not merely by military conquest or political organisation, but by an extraordinary aptitude for engineering the physical world to serve human needs on an unprecedented scale. The infrastructure that sustained Rome and its territories — roads, bridges, drainage systems, harbours — represented a collective ambition that few ancient societies could rival. Nowhere was this ambition more dramatically expressed than in the Roman water supply network, a system of such sophistication and scale that it remained, in many respects, unsurpassed for over a millennium following the empire’s decline.

*Destruction by Thomas Cole, 1836

Water entered Rome through a variety of means, beginning with locally sourced springs and wells, which had served the early city’s modest requirements. As Rome expanded and its population swelled to perhaps one million inhabitants at its height, however, such localised sources proved wholly inadequate to the demands of a metropolis. The solution was monumental: the construction of aqueducts — vast elevated channels, many fashioned in part from lead conduits, which stretched across miles of countryside, traversing valleys on soaring arcaded bridges and tunnelling through hillsides where necessary. These structures were engineered with extraordinary precision, following the natural downward gradient of the surrounding terrain so as to harness gravity as the sole motive force, maintaining a continuous, regulated flow across distances that could exceed fifty miles. The aqueduct was not merely a feat of construction but a feat of applied geometry, demanding of its builders an intimate understanding of hydraulic principles.

*Aqueduct near Rome by Thomas Cole, 1832

By the time Rome’s aqueduct network had reached its fullest extent — a process spanning several centuries, from the construction of the Aqua Appia in 312 BC to the Aqua Alexandrina of the third century AD — the city was served by no fewer than eleven major aqueducts, each drawing on distinct source springs and collectively delivering an estimated one million cubic metres of water per day. This extraordinary volume was not superfluous: Roman civic culture had developed an insatiable appetite for water. The great thermae, or public baths, with their heated pools, cold plunge tanks, and elaborate bathing rituals, consumed water on a prodigious scale, as did the city’s numerous nymphaea and ornamental fountains, the alimentary needs of private households, and the maintenance of the elaborate drainage infrastructure, including the celebrated Cloaca Maxima. A failure or sustained reduction of water supply would have constituted not merely an inconvenience but a genuine humanitarian catastrophe, threatening public health, social order, and the very ceremonies of daily Roman life.

*The Aqua Appia by Agostino Tofanelli, 1833

The principal material employed in the construction of distribution pipes and service lines was lead — plumbum in Latin, a word that bequeaths to us the very term “plumbing.” Lead is a cumulative neurotoxin, and the question of chronic lead exposure in the Roman population has attracted considerable scholarly debate. It should be noted, however, that the Romans were not ignorant of lead’s potential dangers; ancient writers, including Vitruvius in his De Architectura, expressed a degree of concern regarding the use of lead pipes, and some modern historians have argued that the continuous, turbulent flow of water through the aqueducts — which never ceased day or night — would have inhibited the accumulation of lead deposits and the formation of the soluble lead carbonate compounds most associated with leaching. Moreover, the calcite deposits that accrued on the interior of pipes over time acted as a natural barrier between the water and the lead. While it would be anachronistic to credit the Romans with a modern epidemiological understanding of heavy metal toxicity, their system was arguably less injurious than a superficial assessment might suggest.

*1890 illustration of the Cloaca Maxima and the Capitoline Hill

The Romans were equally attentive to the qualitative dimensions of their water supply. Several ancient authors attest to the practice of systematic inspection, whereby curatores aquarum — the magistrates responsible for the administration of the water supply — or their subordinates would assess the water entering the city by means of sensory evaluation: tasting it for bitterness or acidity, examining its clarity and colour, and detecting any unusual odour that might betray contamination or stagnation. Settling tanks (piscinae limariae) were positioned at intervals along the aqueduct courses to allow suspended sediment to precipitate before the water entered the urban distribution network. These measures reflect a coherent, if empirically rather than scientifically grounded, philosophy of water quality management.

*View of the Interior of an Antique Roman Bath by Charles-Louis Clérisseau

It would be neither accurate nor intellectually honest to suggest that Roman water was pure by any modern standard. Contamination from agricultural runoff, proximity to burial grounds, and the insanitary conditions of the city itself inevitably compromised the supply to some degree. Yet the Romans were acutely conscious of this limitation, and their efforts to mitigate it were both systematic and, within the bounds of ancient knowledge, remarkably effective.

The legacy of Rome’s hydraulic engineering endures in ways both literal and conceptual. The aqueducts of the Aqua Virgo, in modified form, still supply Rome’s famous fountains today. More broadly, the Roman insistence on state responsibility for the provision of clean water to an urban population — a principle enacted through immense institutional effort and capital expenditure — established a precedent of civic infrastructure that resonates, consciously or otherwise, in the design of every modern municipal water system. In this, as in so much else, Rome did not merely serve its own age but laid the foundations upon which subsequent civilisations would continue to build.

How Virgil effectively makes the tale of Herakles vs Cacus one of good vs evil

To begin, Virgil paints a despotic and vehement picture of Cacus and the cave he inhabits. Long sentences are used to convey the true extent of Cacus’ wickedness. Virgil uses Cacus’ dwelling ‘where heads of men are nailed to the doors’ as a symbol of his evil. Moving on, Virgil introduces Herakles as ‘the greatest of avengers’ having just conquered Geryon, ‘driving his great bulls along as victor’. The conflict begins when Cacus, ‘his mind mad with frenzy’, steals four of Hercules’ finest bulls, dragging them by the tail (so as to not leave forward footprints) into his cave. It is worth noting here that it is not Herakles who initiates the battle. This time he is not on a mission set for him or in the pursuit of evil. Instead, he stumbles across it, bearing the fruits of his previous labour (the cattle of Geryon). Cacus throws the first punch and disrupts Herakles’ triumphant return home.

Next, Virgil relates to us how, as Hercules was preparing to leave the spot where he was pasturing his cattle, a number of them lowered and one of the stolen heifers returned the call, ‘foiling Cacus’ hopes from her prison’. Realising he had been done an injustice, a great afront, ‘with his indignation truly blazed, with a venomous dark rage’, Hercules starts with weapons in hands, toward the source of the complaining heifer in the mountains. Here, Virgil presents a virtuous and noble Hercules realising he has been wronged, and attempting to stifle the source of the injustice. Mark that Herakles is swift to respond, he does not ponder nor procrastinate. Instead, he shows his reactionary side, and a quickness to show agency. Granted, in the heat of the moment he is not portrayed as ‘cool-as-a-cucumber’, considered and deliberate. Such an approach would not bear fruit against such an unearthly creature as Cacus. Hercules realises from the outset that no approach other than unrestricted, wild and bombastic force could counter an equally wild and bombastic oppressor.

*Landscape with Hercules and Cacus by Nicolas Poussin, 1656-1659 AD

Then it is descried how, when Cacus saw a vehement and highly charged Hercules hurtling towards him, he fled ‘swifter than the East Wind, heading for his cave: fear lent wings to his feet’. What Virgil implies in this sentence is that even the most hedonistic of all villains in the world has not the nerves nor guile to withstand the mere aspect of a Hercules approaching without moderation or restraint. This is a heroic depiction of Hercules (the good) seeking to counter oppression from Cacus (the bad and most certainly ugly) tyrant. Despite this, Virgil also seeks to portray Hercules as showing very human emotions in his quest for vengeance; anger without moderation, resistance against mistreatment and so forth.

Cacus locks himself away in his cave where he secures the entrance before he sees Hercules arriving ‘in a tearing passion, turning his head this way and that, scanning every approach, and gnashing his teeth’. Virgil tells us how Hercules was ‘hot with rage, three times he circled the whole Aventine Hill, three times he tried the stony doorway in vain, three times he sank down exhausted, in the valley’. Here, the repetition of ‘three times’ seeks to convey the willpower and effort Hercules puts into trying to reach his enemy and the lengths of strenuous effort he is willing to endure in order to achieve his goal, driven on by a sense of injustice and a desire for revenge. This is further evidenced by the fact that after having done all this Hercules got up and tore the roof (a sharp pinnacle of flint) off Cacus’ cave, breaking the banks of the river, thundering the heavens and revealing Cacus ‘and his vast realm’. Following this, there is a section where Virgil relates how Cacus’ ‘pallid realms, hated by the gods, and the vast abyss be seen from above, and the spirits tremble at the incoming light’, which signify that Cacus is no longer hidden by darkness. In this moment, all of his evils are revealed to the world by the might of Hercules’ arm and the strength of his willpower.

*Hercules and Cacus

Despite the fact that Cacus’ vile existence has been revealed to all, Hercules’ task is not complete. He must defeat Cacus once and for all. So, Hercules goes about unleashing his complete arsenal and raining it all down upon Cacus ‘penned in the hollow rock’. Virgil says that at this stage, ‘since there was no escape now’ Cacus began belching ‘thick smoke from his throat’ whereupon ‘darkness mixed with fire’. Effective and exciting description such as this captures the reader’s imagination. From here, we are told that ‘Hercules, in his pride could not endure it’, indicating that he lamented Cacus exercising what power he still possessed, and he could not withstand the sight of him any longer. So, leaping into the belly of the flames, Hercules chokes Cacus until his ‘throat drained of blood’. Following this, Hercules rips the doors off the cave, further exposing Cacus’ sins to the gods. He then proceeds to drag his victim out ‘by the feet’ where in the light people gazed upon his ‘hideous eyes’ and his ‘shaggy bristling chest’.

Virgil’s use of extremely potent and prominent description makes this a highly effective tale of good vs evil where morality and its impact on Hercules’ heroic disposition are on full display. It is very successful in achieving its goal of increasing Hercules’ status as a symbol of high and right mindedness in a world of corruption and depravity.

Hercules and Cacus: Heroism, Tyranny, and the Roman Moral Imagination

The story of Hercules and Cacus would have seized the imagination of a Roman audience with an immediacy and force that few other mythological narratives could match. At its most fundamental level, the tale enacts one of the most ancient and enduring structures in human storytelling — the irreconcilable opposition of good and evil, virtue and depravity, civilising order and monstrous chaos — yet it does so with a particularity of character and incident that elevates it far beyond the merely archetypal. For a Roman audience steeped in the traditions of heroic legend and acutely sensitive to the moral dimensions of physical conflict, this story would have resonated on multiple registers simultaneously: as myth, as history, as civic allegory, and as a celebration of the very values upon which Roman identity was understood to rest.

*engraving based upon Pollice Verso by Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1872

Hercules occupied a singular and complex position within the Roman religious and cultural imagination. Adopted from the Greek Heracles and thoroughly naturalised into the Roman tradition, he was venerated not as a remote or ethereal deity but as a hero in the most immediate and visceral sense — a figure of flesh and sinew who achieved the extraordinary not through divine favour alone, but through the relentless exercise of courage, endurance, and physical supremacy in the face of seemingly insurmountable opposition. His mythological biography, structured as it was around the famous Labours and a succession of violent encounters with monsters, tyrants, and malevolent forces, presented Roman audiences with a template of heroism defined by adversity overcome. It is precisely this quality — the capacity to prevail against unrelenting opposition, to absorb suffering and emerge triumphant — that rendered Hercules so compelling a figure in the Roman moral imagination. He embodied, in hyperbolic form, the virtues that Rome sought to project onto its own historical identity: fortitude, resolve, and the willingness to employ overwhelming force in the service of justice.

Farnese Hercules, a Roman marble sculpture, 3rd century AD

Cacus, in this context, functions as far more than a convenient antagonist. As depicted most elaborately in the eighth book of Virgil’s Aeneid, and treated also by Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Cacus is a creature of elemental malevolence — a fire-breathing giant who dwells in a cave on the Aventine Hill, terrorising the surrounding region with wanton violence and theft. His theft of Hercules’ cattle, accomplished through the cunning deception of dragging the animals backwards by their tails to obscure their tracks, compounds physical menace with a duplicitous cunning that Roman moral sensibility found peculiarly contemptible. Cacus represents not merely brute opposition but a specifically Roman conception of tyranny: ungoverned, predatory, and antithetical to the ordered communal life upon which civilisation depends. That his lair is situated beneath what will become the sacred soil of Rome itself invests his defeat with a deeper significance, transforming a mythological confrontation into a founding story — the necessary abolition of chaos as a precondition for the establishment of order.

*Hercules and the Hydra by Antonio del Pollaiuolo, 1475

The encounter between Hercules and Cacus also speaks directly to distinctly Roman sensibilities regarding physical power and martial violence. Rome was a society that glorified, institutionalised, and ritualised the spectacle of physical dominance to a degree unparalleled among ancient civilisations. The munera — gladiatorial contests — the triumphal processions displaying the subjugated enemies of Rome, the public execution of criminals and prisoners of war: all of these practices reflect a cultural appetite for the demonstration of overwhelming force and the annihilation of the opponent. Hercules’ dispatch of Cacus — dragging the monster from his cave, throttling him with bare hands, destroying the very stronghold of his tyranny — would have gratified this sensibility profoundly, staging, as it does, precisely the kind of muscular, unambiguous victory that Roman culture celebrated above all others. There is, in Virgil’s rendering especially, a quality of theatrical ferocity to the episode that seems calibrated to evoke the visceral pleasure of watching righteous violence enacted upon a deserving target.

*Hercules and Cacus by Bartolomeo Pinelli

Yet the story transcends mere spectacle. The qualities Hercules exhibits — not only strength, but righteous anger, protective instinct towards the innocent, and the implacable determination to see justice done — are precisely those virtues that Roman civic culture elevated to the status of ideals. He acts not for personal glory alone, but as an agent of a moral order larger than himself, ridding the community of a predator and thereby making habitation, cultivation, and ultimately civilisation possible. This dimension of the narrative would have carried particular weight within the framework of Augustan ideology, in which Virgil composed the Aeneid: the defeat of Cacus prefigures and legitimises Rome’s own historical mission, its self-appointed role as the power that imposes order upon a disordered world.

*Aeneas Flees Burning Troy by Frederico Barocci, 1598

Furthermore, for a Roman audience conscious of the mythological origins of their city, the story carried the additional charge of ancestral pride. Evander, the Arcadian king who welcomes Aeneas to the site of the future Rome in Virgil’s account, has established the worship of Hercules at the Ara Maxima — the Great Altar in the Forum Boarium — in commemoration of the hero’s victory over Cacus. The very ground of Rome, in this telling, was consecrated by a Herculean act of purification long before the city’s formal foundation. To hear or read this myth was not merely to consume entertainment but to participate in an act of civic memory, reaffirming one’s connection to a foundational narrative of heroism and order triumphant over savagery.

Stories of this kind served, in the deepest sense, an ideological and psychological function within Roman culture. They supplied the emotional vocabulary of heroism — courage celebrated, wickedness punished, the community delivered — that sustained Roman collective identity across centuries of expansion, civil conflict, and imperial ambition. Hercules fighting Cacus in his cave on the Aventine is, in this light, not merely a myth but a mirror: one in which Rome saw reflected its own most cherished image of itself, and found in that reflection a continuing reason to persevere.

*Hercules and Cacus by Baccio Bandinelli, 1530-1534 AD

The Myth of Romulus and Remus

Romulus and Remus: Foundation, Fratricide, and the Competing Traditions of Rome’s Origins

Few myths in the ancient world bear the weight of meaning that attaches to the story of Romulus and Remus. As the foundational narrative of the most powerful state the Western world had yet produced, the legend of Rome’s twin founders occupied a unique position in the cultural and ideological life of the Roman people — simultaneously a piece of inherited mythology, a quasi-historical account of civic origins, and a source of profound, unresolved tension at the very heart of Roman self-understanding. That the city should have been founded in an act of fratricide — one brother killing the other over the precise location of a wall — was a paradox the Romans never entirely escaped, and which their greatest writers returned to repeatedly, each offering their own interpretation of an episode whose troubling implications refused to be smoothed away.

The myth exists not in a single authoritative version but in a rich and sometimes contradictory plurality of traditions, refracted through the work of historians, poets, and antiquarians writing across several centuries. To read these accounts alongside one another is to appreciate not only the story itself, but the varying ideological pressures and literary purposes that shaped its telling at different moments in Roman history.

*marble bust of Virgil, 45 BC

The Origins of Romulus and Remus: Aeneas, Alba Longa, and the Line of Kings

Most ancient accounts situate the birth of Romulus and Remus within a broader mythological framework tracing Rome’s origins back to the Trojan War. According to this tradition, the hero Aeneas — son of the goddess Venus and the Trojan prince Anchises — fled the burning city of Troy and, after years of wandering recounted in Virgil’s Aeneid, eventually reached the shores of Latium, where he founded a dynasty that would ultimately produce the founders of Rome itself. This genealogical connection between the Trojan past and the Roman present was of enormous ideological significance, particularly in the Augustan period, serving to invest Rome’s origins with a divine pedigree and to situate the city within the grand sweep of mythological and heroic time.

*1st century Roman fresco from Pompeii depicting Aeneas

The immediate ancestors of Romulus and Remus were the kings of Alba Longa, a city founded by Aeneas’ son Ascanius in the Alban Hills. It is here that the specific narrative of the twins begins, in an account preserved most fully by the historian Livy in the first book of his Ab Urbe Condita — “From the Foundation of the City” — and by the Greek historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus in his Antiquitates Romanae, composed in Rome during the Augustan age and representing the most detailed surviving account of Rome’s early legendary history.

The Usurpation of Numitor and the Birth of the Twins

According to Livy, the throne of Alba Longa had descended through several generations of Aeneas’ line until it reached Procas, who left two sons: Numitor and Amulius. By right of birth, the throne belonged to Numitor, the elder; but Amulius, driven by ambition, seized power by force, expelled his brother, and took the kingship for himself. To extinguish any future threat from Numitor’s line, Amulius killed Numitor’s male heirs and, in what Livy presents as a characteristically calculating act of cruelty, appointed Numitor’s daughter Rhea Silvia — also known in some traditions as Ilia — as a Vestal Virgin. The Vestals were bound by sacred obligation to lifelong chastity; by consecrating his niece to this office, Amulius ensured, or so he calculated, that she could produce no legitimate heirs to challenge his usurped authority.

*marble sculpture of Rhea Silvia by Jacopo della Quercia, part of the Fonte Gaia, 1414-1419

The plan was, by divine intervention, undone. Rhea Silvia was visited — or, in the more forceful language of some ancient accounts, violated — by the god Mars, and in due course gave birth to twin sons. Livy records that she attributed her pregnancy to the god, though he notes with characteristic historiographical caution that this claim may have been made to lend dignity to a more mundane transgression, or alternatively that it was simply accepted as true. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, writing from a more credulous perspective, elaborates the divine encounter in greater detail, presenting it as a genuine theophany and emphasising the sacred significance of Mars as both a deity of war and a divine ancestor of the Roman people.

Amulius, on learning of the birth, ordered that the twins be drowned in the Tiber — a fate considered sufficiently final and, in its use of natural agency rather than direct murder, perhaps slightly less impious. The servants charged with this task instead placed the infants in a basket or trough and set them adrift on the river, which had overflowed its banks. The waters receded and deposited the basket at the foot of the Palatine Hill, beneath a fig tree known as the Ficus Ruminalis — a tree that retained religious veneration in later Roman times and whose association with the founding myth was pointed out to visitors well into the historical period.

The She-Wolf and the Shepherd: Competing Interpretations

It is at this point in the narrative that its most iconic and enduring image emerges: the she-wolf who suckled the abandoned infants. Livy records that a she-wolf, descending to the river to drink, heard the crying of the twins and nursed them at her teats, while a woodpecker — another animal sacred to Mars — brought them food. The image of the wolf-nursed founders became the defining symbol of Rome, reproduced on coinage, in sculpture, and in ritual commemoration across the entire span of Roman history, and it survives today in the celebrated bronze of the Capitoline Wolf.

*Romulus and Remus from the Speculum Romance Magnificentiae series by Antonio Lafreri

Livy, however, registers an alternative interpretation with characteristic intellectual honesty. The Latin word lupa, he notes, denoted not only a she-wolf but also, colloquially, a prostitute — and there was a tradition according to which the twins were not nursed by a wild animal at all, but were taken in and suckled by a woman of this description, the wife of the shepherd Faustulus, whose name in some accounts was Acca Larentia and who was known locally by the nickname lupa on account of her profession or her promiscuous habits. Livy presents both versions without arbitrating definitively between them, and the ambiguity is instructive: it suggests both the antiquity of the tradition and the Romans’ own consciousness that their founding myth contained an element of the earthy and the disreputable that the more elevated, wolf-and-woodpecker version served to dignify without entirely suppressing.

*marble statue of Titus Livius, or Livy, by Josef Lax, 1900

Plutarch, writing in Greek in his Life of Romulus — part of the Parallel Lives in which he paired great Greek and Roman figures — provides a particularly rich and synthetic account, drawing on a wider range of earlier sources than either Livy or Dionysius and presenting the mythological tradition with a biographer’s interest in character and motivation. Plutarch records the Acca Larentia tradition alongside the divine wolf narrative and adds several further variants, including one in which the name “Romulus” itself was subject to dispute, and another in which the twins were believed by some ancient authorities to have been the children not of Mars but of Aeneas himself — a genealogical compression that collapses the distance between the Trojan arrival and the city’s foundation.

Fabius Pictor, Rome’s earliest historian writing in the late third century BCE, is among the most ancient sources for the twin myth, though his work survives only in fragments and citations by later authors. His account broadly prefigures the canonical tradition reproduced by Livy, and its existence demonstrates that the essential narrative structure — the usurpation of Numitor, the Vestal mother, the exposure and rescue, the wolf, and the eventual foundation — was already well established in the Roman literary tradition by the time of the Punic Wars.

Youth, Revolt, and the Restoration of Numitor

The twins were raised by Faustulus and Acca Larentia among the shepherds of the Palatine Hill, growing to become exceptional young men distinguished by strength, courage, and natural authority. Livy and Dionysius both describe them as leaders among their peers, who gathered around them bands of companions devoted to hunting and the defence of the flocks against bandits. Their activities eventually brought them into conflict with the herdsmen of Numitor, their maternal grandfather — a conflict whose resolution led to the discovery of their true identity.

*Romulus and Remus Taken in by Faustulus by Pietro da Cortona, 1643

In Livy’s account, it is Remus who is captured and brought before Numitor after an altercation, and Numitor who, struck by the young man’s bearing and by certain details of his story, begins to suspect the truth. Faustulus, meanwhile, reveals to Romulus the circumstances of their birth and exposure. The twins, now possessed of their true identity, coordinate an attack on Amulius: Romulus rallies his followers to assault the palace while Remus, aided by Numitor’s supporters, creates a diversion. Amulius is killed, and Numitor is restored to his rightful throne at Alba Longa.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, whose account is more expansive and rhetorically elaborate, adds considerable detail to this episode, including speeches that articulate the moral dimensions of the restoration — the justice of legitimate kingship reasserted against usurpation — with an explicitness that reflects both his rhetorical training and his evident interest in presenting Roman history as an exemplum of political virtue for his Greek readership.

The Foundation of Rome and the Death of Remus

With Numitor restored, the twins resolved to found a city of their own on the hills by the Tiber where they had been raised. It is here that the narrative arrives at its most fraught and significant episode: the quarrel over the precise site of the new foundation, and the death of Remus.

Livy recounts that the twins disagreed over which hill should be chosen — Romulus favouring the Palatine, Remus the Aventine — and resolved the dispute by augury, each taking the auspices to determine the will of the gods. Remus, it was reported, saw six vultures; Romulus saw twelve. The interpretation of this result was itself contested: some held that Remus, seeing his omen first, had the stronger claim; others that Romulus, seeing the greater number, was the gods’ true choice. The dispute became violent, and in the struggle that followed, Remus was killed. Livy records two versions of how this came about: in one, Remus was killed by Romulus himself in the heat of the quarrel; in the other, he was struck down by one of Romulus’ followers named Celer, after leaping contemptuously over the newly dug furrow marking the boundary of Romulus’ city — an act of symbolic desecration, since the sacred boundary, the pomerium, was inviolable in Roman tradition. Romulus’ reported response, in the version that became most familiar — sic deinde quicumque alius transiliet moenia mea (“so perish hereafter whoever else shall leap over my walls”) — is at once a statement of founding authority and an acknowledgement of fratricide that Roman historians never succeeded in rendering entirely comfortable.

*engraving depicting Romulus killing Remus attributed to Augustyn Mirys

Plutarch’s treatment of the death of Remus is notably fuller and more emotionally engaged. He records multiple ancient versions: that Remus was killed by Romulus in anger; that he was killed by Celer on Romulus’ behalf or without his direct instruction; and that some authorities, unwilling to ascribe the murder to Rome’s founder, maintained that Remus died in the omen contest under circumstances that were accidental or ambiguous. Plutarch notes that several ancient writers — including Fabius Pictor and Diocles of Peparethus, a Greek author who had written about Rome’s origins even earlier — gave divergent accounts of these events, and he reproduces their disagreements with scholarly conscientiousness. He also records a tradition preserved by certain authorities in which Romulus did not kill Remus himself but was nevertheless understood to bear responsibility, having created the conditions in which the killing became inevitable — a reading that modern interpreters might find psychologically the most penetrating of all.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, deeply invested in the project of presenting Roman history as morally coherent and the Roman character as fundamentally virtuous, handles the fratricide with particular delicacy. He favours the version in which Celer, acting independently, strikes Remus down, thereby partially exculpating Romulus from direct responsibility — an interpretive preference that tells us as much about the ideological anxieties of the Augustan age as it does about the underlying tradition.

Ovid, in his Fasti — a poetic calendar of Roman religious festivals — touches on the foundation myth in a characteristically oblique and allusive manner, more concerned with the emotional texture of the story and its ritual afterlife than with its historical or political dimensions. Ovid’s Romulus is a more ambivalent figure than the decisive leader of Livy’s account, and the Fasti as a whole conveys a sense of the complex, layered relationship between myth, ritual, and Roman civic identity that sustained the authority of these stories long after their literal truth had ceased to be the primary concern.

*marble bust of Publius Ovidius Naso, or Ovid, 1st century AD

The Fratricide and its Legacy

The killing of Remus cast a long shadow over Roman historical consciousness. Ancient authors returned to it with a frequency that suggests an abiding unease — an awareness that the city’s very foundation was tainted by a crime of the most intimate and transgressive kind. The fratricide served, in the work of moralistic historians and poets, as an originary moment of Roman violence, a founding sin that found its echo in every subsequent episode of civil conflict, most acutely in the catastrophic wars of the late Republic. Horace, in the sixteenth Epode, written during the turmoil of the triumviral period, invokes the death of Remus as the source from which all Rome’s self-destructive violence ultimately flows: the blood of a brother shed at the city’s birth had, in this reading, cursed Rome with a propensity for self-destruction that no subsequent achievement could fully expiate.

*Cain Killing Abel by Pietro Novelli, 1625-1647

Livy, writing under Augustus and deeply committed to the project of moral renewal that Augustan ideology claimed to represent, acknowledges the fratricide squarely but situates it within a narrative of founding energy so powerful that it ultimately transcends the crime — though the discomfort is never entirely resolved. For Augustus himself, whose political settlement depended on the suppression of civil war and the projection of peace and renewed civic virtue, the myth of fratricide was ideologically charged in ways that demanded careful management: the emperor’s own programme of religious and cultural restoration was, in part, an implicit answer to the founding crime, a claim that the blood-debt had at last been discharged.

The Apotheosis of Romulus

The myth does not end with the foundation. Ancient sources record that Romulus, having reigned as Rome’s first king for some decades, disappeared during a violent storm while reviewing his troops on the Field of Mars. The traditional interpretation, reported by Livy and elaborated by Plutarch, held that he had been taken up bodily into the heavens by his divine father Mars, and was thereafter worshipped by the Romans under the name Quirinus — one of the three great gods of the archaic Roman state, alongside Jupiter and Mars. Plutarch records that a senator named Proculus Julius subsequently announced to the people that he had seen Romulus in a vision, radiant and larger than mortal size, who had instructed him to tell the Romans to cultivate virtue and the arts of war, and to know that they would be the masters of the world.

*The Apotheosis of Washington by Constantino Brumidi, 1865

There was, however, a less elevated tradition. Livy himself notes, with the kind of studied neutrality that characterises his treatment of the more troubling passages of early Roman history, that there were those who suspected the senators of having murdered Romulus and concealed the crime, dismembering his body and carrying away the pieces beneath their robes. The apotheosis, on this reading, was a pious fiction confected to explain an inconvenient disappearance. Plutarch treats this version at greater length, acknowledging that the suspicious circumstances of Romulus’ death — occurring, as it did, without witnesses during a solar eclipse — lent themselves readily to a less miraculous interpretation. That the Romans preserved and transmitted both versions simultaneously is itself revealing: it suggests a historical consciousness sophisticated enough to hold conflicting accounts in suspension, and a pragmatic relationship with founding mythology that prioritised its civic utility over its literal coherence.

Conclusion: Myth, History, and Roman Identity

The myth of Romulus and Remus is not, and was never intended to be, a straightforward historical record. It is, rather, a complex and multiply-authored narrative that served the needs of different audiences in different periods, articulating anxieties about violence and legitimacy, celebrating the divine origins of Roman power, and providing a symbolic vocabulary through which the Romans could understand their own deepest contradictions. The she-wolf and the twins, the quarrel over the walls, the death of Remus, the apotheosis of the founder: these images endured not because they were believed in the way that modern historiography demands, but because they spoke, with remarkable precision, to the realities of Roman experience — a civilisation built on conquest and law in equal measure, on the annihilation of enemies and the construction of order, always aware that the blood at the beginning of its story was a brother’s.

*Oath of the Horatii by Jacques-Louis David, 1784-1785

Theseus and Romulus: Misfortune, Moral Responsibility, and the Limits of Heroic Virtue in Plutarch’s Parallel Lives

Few exercises in ancient biographical writing are as intellectually demanding, or as morally searching, as Plutarch’s decision to place Theseus and Romulus side by side in the Parallel Lives. The pairing is, on the surface, an obvious one: both men are legendary founders of their respective cities, both claim divine or semi-divine parentage, both rise to greatness through a succession of violent trials, and both leave behind them a record of achievement inseparable from a record of transgression. Yet the deeper logic of Plutarch’s comparison is not simply structural but ethical. By placing the two figures in sustained juxtaposition and subjecting their careers to rigorous moral evaluation in the synkrisis — the comparative epilogue that follows each pair of Lives — Plutarch invites his reader to consider not merely what these men did, but what their actions reveal about the nature of human character, the limits of heroic responsibility, and the relationship between personal virtue and the accidents of fortune. The result is one of the most nuanced treatments of moral psychology in all of ancient literature, and one that repays close and careful reading.

The Misfortunes of Romulus: Adversity, Providence, and the Problem of Fratricide

It is a striking feature of Romulus’ story that his misfortunes preceded his birth — or rather, that the conditions of his birth were themselves the product of an act of political cruelty. The usurpation of the Alban throne by Amulius, and his subsequent consecration of Rhea Silvia as a Vestal Virgin in order to extinguish the legitimate line of Numitor, ensured that Romulus entered the world already marked by tyranny and persecution. The twin infants, born of a union with Mars that Amulius regarded as an intolerable dynastic threat, were condemned to death by drowning in the Tiber — a sentence whose very method, delegating the act of destruction to the indifferent agency of a river, betrayed the combination of ruthlessness and superstitious caution that characterised the usurper’s rule.

*Romulus and Remus depicted together on a medallion

That Romulus survived this sentence was, by the logic of the myth, a matter simultaneously of providence and of fortune — and the two are not always easy to disentangle. The intervention of the she-wolf, the nurturing of the woodpecker, the discovery by the shepherd Faustulus: these are the instruments of a fate that, in retrospect, appears purposeful and divinely ordered. Yet it would be a misreading of Plutarch’s attitude to treat the fortunate outcome as simply cancelling the suffering that preceded it. The turbulence of Romulus’ early life — the illegitimacy of his birth in the eyes of the state, the sentence of death, the rearing among shepherds far beneath his true station — constitutes a genuine adversity, one that furnishes both the psychological foundation and the moral impetus for the extraordinary deeds of his maturity. Greatness, for Plutarch, is rarely bestowed; it is typically forged in the crucible of early hardship, and Romulus’ biography exemplifies this principle with unusual clarity.

The most fraught episode in Romulus’ misfortunes, however, is not the persecution of infancy but the killing of Remus — an event that sits at the moral centre of his life and that Plutarch approaches with characteristic care, refusing either to condemn outright or to exculpate entirely. The circumstances of Remus’ death, as Plutarch acknowledges, were attended by a degree of tragic contingency: the failed augury, in which the interpretation of the omens was itself disputed, introduced an element of ambiguity into the quarrel over the city’s site that rendered the subsequent violence at least partially a product of structural misfortune rather than simple malice. Romulus did not seek his brother’s death as a matter of cold calculation; the killing arose from a quarrel that was, in origin, a disagreement about sacred procedure — about the proper interpretation of divine signs — and it is worth registering the extent to which the two brothers were, in a meaningful sense, victims of an irresolvable ambiguity rather than simply agents of will.

*Romulus and Remus, etching by Wenceslaus Hollar after a painting by Giulio Romano, 1652

Nevertheless, Plutarch is unwilling to let Romulus escape the moral weight of what occurred. He invokes a principle that runs through much of his biographical thinking: that we more readily excuse anger when it is provoked by a cause of proportionate gravity, in the same way that a wound inflicted by a more powerful blow is more easily understood even if not forgiven. Applying this principle to the death of Remus, however, Plutarch finds it wanting: Romulus, he judges, had no sufficient reason — no cause of the requisite gravity — to have been provoked to lethal fury by a disagreement that concerned, at bottom, the common good of the very community they were jointly building. The anger, in other words, was disproportionate to its occasion, and disproportionate anger, however understandable in its origins, cannot be excused by appealing to the general principle that strong provocations mitigate strong responses. This is a subtle but important distinction in Plutarch’s moral reasoning: it is not anger itself, but the relationship between the magnitude of the anger and the seriousness of the provocation, that determines the degree to which an act of violence can be morally accommodated.

What emerges from Plutarch’s treatment of Romulus is, ultimately, a portrait of a man whose virtues and vices are intimately related — whose capacity for decisive, ferocious action, the quality that made him a founder and a king, is also the quality that made him a fratricide. The same force of character that enabled Romulus to rise from obscurity, to overthrow a tyrant, to build a city and a state from nothing, expressed itself in the act that permanently stained his legacy. This is not, for Plutarch, a contradiction to be resolved but a complexity to be understood — and it is one of the most honest and penetrating observations in the Lives.

The Misfortunes of Theseus: Choice, Negligence, and the Weight of Voluntary Action

If Romulus’ misfortunes are, at least in their origins, largely imposed upon him by the malevolent agency of others, Theseus presents a considerably more complicated moral profile, in which the boundaries between misfortune genuinely suffered and disaster actively courted are persistently difficult to locate. Theseus, unlike Romulus, was not condemned to death as an infant; he was not the victim of a usurper’s dynastic calculation. His adventures — the killing of the Minotaur, the various journeys and encounters of his heroic career — were undertaken freely, as expressions of his own will and ambition. The question of whether the hardships and losses that attended these adventures should properly be characterised as misfortunes at all is therefore a legitimate and important one. Misfortune, in the fullest sense, implies the operation of an adverse fate upon a subject who has not chosen the conditions that brought it about; and for much of his career, Theseus was not a passive subject of circumstance but its active architect.

*upper portion of a brass statue of Theseus by Georgios Vitalis, 1868

This distinction matters, because it shapes the nature of the sympathy — and the censure — that Theseus’ story elicits. Where Romulus, even in his worst act, was responding to a provocation that, however insufficient, was real, many of the disasters of Theseus’ life flowed from decisions that were either poorly considered, morally questionable, or both. Plutarch is not restrained in his critique of Theseus on this score. His treatment of what he terms Theseus’ “rape of women” — a category that encompasses not only the abduction of the Amazonian queen Hippolyta and the young Helen of Sparta but a broader pattern of erotic violence and recklessness — presents a catalogue of conduct that he attributes primarily to lust and hedonism rather than to any recognisably heroic or political motive. This is a damning characterisation, and one that Plutarch deploys in deliberate contrast with his assessment of Romulus’ conduct toward the Sabine women — an act of collective abduction that was, by any measure, a serious violation, but which Plutarch presents as having been carried out for reasons of civic necessity and dynastic survival, and which was followed by what he regards as genuine and honourable treatment of the women concerned. The comparison is instructive and, it must be said, not entirely fair to Theseus: Plutarch’s comparative framework sometimes leads him to construct contrasts that serve the rhetorical purposes of the synkrisis at the expense of strict evidentiary balance.

*’Theseus Liberator’, from Pompeii, approx. 45-79 AD

The single episode in Theseus’ life that most clearly merits the designation of genuine misfortune — and that elicits, even from Plutarch’s relatively severe vantage point, a degree of sympathetic consideration — is the death of King Aegeus. The story is well known: Theseus, returning from Crete after his victory over the Minotaur, forgot to change the black sail of his ship for a white one, the pre-arranged signal that would have informed his waiting father that he was alive. Aegeus, seeing the black sail on the horizon, concluded that his son was dead, and threw himself from the cliff in grief. Plutarch, in his synkrisis, holds Theseus firmly responsible for this catastrophe, asserting that even before the most lenient judges and furnished with the most elaborate defence, Theseus could not escape the charge of parricide — a word that carries, in the Roman and Greek moral vocabulary, an almost uniquely terrible weight.

This judgement, while not without a basis in the moral logic of antiquity, seems on close examination excessively severe, and there are good grounds for arguing that Plutarch, in his eagerness to ensure a balanced critical account of both founders, overstates Theseus’ culpability at this point. The forgetting of a sail — an act of thoughtlessness rather than malice, committed in the aftermath of labours of a genuinely extraordinary kind — hardly constitutes a crime of the magnitude that Plutarch’s language implies. Theseus had just killed the Minotaur, navigated the political complexities of Minos’ court, and liberated a company of Athenian hostages; that he should have failed, in the exhaustion and exhilaration of return, to attend to a domestic detail of considerable emotional rather than practical urgency is, if not entirely excusable, at least humanly understandable to a degree that the charge of parricide does not acknowledge. Furthermore, one might argue with some justification that Aegeus himself bore a measure of responsibility for his own death: to see a black sail at a distance and to act immediately and irrevocably upon that single ambiguous signal, without pausing to consider the range of circumstances that might explain or complicate its meaning, was itself a failure of judgement — a failure of the kind that Plutarch, in other contexts, would be unlikely to excuse. Haste and the refusal to entertain uncertainty are not, in Plutarch’s moral universe, admirable qualities, and it is not obvious that Aegeus escapes entirely the criticism that his biographer so readily directs at his son.

*part of an Attic red-figure kylix, attributed to the Kodros Painter, depicting King Aegeas in consultation with the Oracle of Delphi

Plutarch does acknowledge, in passing, a version of events in which Aegeus did not throw himself deliberately from the Acropolis but rather, in his eagerness to look out toward the returning fleet, ran forward, tripped, and fell — a variant that, in distributing the agency of death across accident rather than despair, significantly reduces the moral temperature of the episode and the degree of blame that can reasonably be attached to Theseus. That Plutarch records this version while ultimately preferring the more accusatory one is itself revealing: it suggests that the tradition was genuinely plural, and that Plutarch’s choice of emphasis was at least partly a function of his argumentative needs in the synkrisis rather than a simple reflection of what the sources most reliably attested.

The Causes of Misfortune: Character, Fate, and the Ethics of Agency

One of the most intellectually significant passages in Plutarch’s treatment of both men is his explicit reflection on the causes of their respective misfortunes — a reflection that takes him beyond the individual case studies and into the territory of moral philosophy more broadly conceived. Plutarch is clear, and emphatic, that the miseries which befall men of the stature of Theseus and Romulus are not to be understood primarily as the workings of an external divine fate — as though the gods were simply distributing adversity at random, or enacting a predetermined script in which individual human choices were merely epiphenomenal. Bad fortune, he insists, does not descend entirely from divine necessity; it is generated, at least in significant part, by the ethics and moral character that inhabit individual people and that express themselves through their decisions and actions. This is a position of considerable philosophical importance, aligning Plutarch broadly with the Stoic and Platonic traditions that emphasised the primacy of internal moral states — of virtue and vice as they actually reside in the character of the individual — over external circumstance in determining the quality of a human life.

The implication of this position for the evaluation of Theseus and Romulus is far-reaching. If misfortune is, at least partly, a product of character, then the misfortunes of these two men are not simply things that happened to them but things that, in some meaningful sense, they brought upon themselves — expressions of the same inner lives that produced their heroic achievements. Romulus’ fratricide was the dark expression of a force of character that, directed outward against tyrants and enemies, had been his greatest virtue; Theseus’ erotic recklessness, his negligence, his tendency to act without fully reckoning the consequences of his choices — these were not aberrations superimposed on an otherwise virtuous nature but features of the same character that made him the most celebrated hero of Attica. The miseries and the greatness are, for Plutarch, aspects of a single whole.

*marble bust of Plutarch, 2nd century AD

This is not, it should be emphasised, a deterministic position. Plutarch does not argue that Romulus and Theseus were simply fated to commit the acts they committed, or that their characters exempted them from moral responsibility. On the contrary: it is precisely because character expresses itself through choice — because Romulus chose to kill, and Theseus chose to forget, or to abduct, or to act without due deliberation — that they remain morally accountable for their actions. The recognition that character shapes choice does not dissolve responsibility; it deepens it, by directing our attention to the dispositions from which choices flow rather than to the superficial mechanics of any single act. To judge Romulus or Theseus rightly, in Plutarch’s view, is not simply to evaluate their individual deeds in isolation but to assess the character that produced them — and it is ultimately on the basis of that character, rather than on any simple tallying of virtues and vices, that Plutarch arrives at his comparative verdict.

Plutarch’s Verdict: Measured Sympathy and the Hierarchy of Culpability

Plutarch’s final comparative assessment declines the temptation of a simple ranking. Both men are found to have wronged others significantly, and both are found to have suffered genuinely; but the nature and distribution of their wrongdoing and their suffering are judged to be meaningfully different. Romulus emerges, in Plutarch’s assessment, with a degree of credit that Theseus is ultimately denied, not because his acts were less violent or his crimes less serious, but because the conditions from which he rose — born into persecution, sentenced to death, raised in obscurity — invest his subsequent achievements with a moral grandeur that partially offsets, though it cannot entirely cancel, the darkness of the fratricide. There is, in Plutarch’s treatment of Romulus, a respect for the sheer improbability of what he accomplished and for the virtues — courage, resolution, civic vision — that his accomplishment required, which tempers the judgement without compromising its honesty.

Theseus, by contrast, is judged to have been wronged to a greater extent — in the sense that more of what befell him was, at its root, the product of his own choices rather than the malice of others — and to have wronged others more gratuitously, without the mitigation of political necessity or civic purpose that Plutarch is prepared to extend to at least some of Romulus’ more troubling acts. The pattern of erotic violence, in particular, is presented as a failure of self-governance that sits uneasily alongside the heroic achievements with which it coexists, and which Plutarch is unwilling to explain away by reference to the conventions of heroic biography.

What makes Plutarch’s comparative treatment so enduringly valuable is precisely its refusal of easy resolution. He does not invite us to admire these men without reservation, nor does he invite us to condemn them without sympathy. He invites us, rather, to do what he himself does throughout the Lives: to attend carefully to the relationship between a man’s character and his fate, to resist the temptation of simple moral verdicts where the evidence demands complexity, and to recognise that the figures who shaped the ancient world were, in their grandeur and their failure alike, recognisably and instructively human.

Theseus and the Minotaur: Origins, Myth, and the Enduring Power of the Labyrinth

The myth of Theseus and the Minotaur occupies a singular position within the vast corpus of Greek mythology. It is a story of unusual richness and density, layering together themes of divine retribution, transgressive desire, civic duty, heroic courage, and labyrinthine deception in ways that have captivated audiences from antiquity to the present day. Unlike many Greek myths whose appeal rests primarily on the spectacular nature of their divine machinery, the story of Theseus and the Minotaur derives much of its enduring power from the deeply human anxieties it encodes: the fear of the monstrous, the obligations of the state to its citizens, the complex interplay of love and betrayal, and the hero’s capacity to impose order upon chaos. That it has sustained continuous reinterpretation across more than two and a half millennia of Western cultural history is testament not merely to the vividness of its surface narrative but to the inexhaustible fertility of its underlying symbolic architecture.

*Theseus and the Minotaur by Antonio Canova, 1781-1782

The Origins of the Minotaur: Divine Punishment and the Transgression of Minos

The myth does not begin with the Minotaur itself, but with the circumstances of its conception — circumstances rooted in an act of impiety whose consequences radiate outward through several generations and whose moral logic is characteristically Greek in its insistence that the gods neither forget nor forgive a broken oath.

King Minos of Crete, seeking to confirm his right to the throne against the competing claims of his brothers, appealed to Poseidon, god of the sea, to furnish a sign of divine favour. Poseidon responded by causing a magnificent white bull of preternatural beauty to rise from the waves — a creature so extraordinary in its appearance that its emergence from the sea constituted, in itself, an incontrovertible demonstration of divine sanction. Minos was to sacrifice the bull in Poseidon’s honour, sealing the compact between mortal king and immortal deity; his authority, thus divinely ratified, would be unassailable. The arrangement was clear, the obligation unambiguous.

Minos, however, could not bring himself to destroy an animal of such surpassing quality. He substituted a lesser bull from his own herds for the sacrifice, retaining the divine animal for his own purposes — an act of greed and impiety that combined the violation of a sacred oath with the calculated deception of a god. Poseidon’s response was commensurate with the transgression. He afflicted Queen Pasiphae, wife of Minos, with an overwhelming and unnatural passion for the white bull — a punishment whose cruelty lay precisely in its inversion of the natural order, turning desire, ordinarily the seat of human connection and continuity, into the instrument of degradation and shame. Ancient sources including Apollodorus in his Bibliotheca and Diodorus Siculus in his Bibliotheca Historica record this episode in terms that make its theological logic explicit: the suffering visited upon Pasiphae was not arbitrary but precisely calibrated, directed at the household of the man who had dishonoured the god, and designed to produce consequences whose horror would far outlast the original offence.

*marble bust of Diodorus Siculus, 1st century BC

Pasiphae, consumed by a desire she could neither control nor resist, sought the assistance of the master craftsman Daedalus, who had come to reside at the Minoan court. Daedalus — whose ingenuity, as the myth makes clear, was as morally uncommitted as it was technically brilliant — constructed for her a hollow wooden cow, covered in hide, within which Pasiphae concealed herself so that the bull might approach her. The result of this union was the Minotaur: a creature of monstrous hybrid form, possessing the body of a man and the head and neck of a bull, whose very existence was a living testament to the consequences of royal impiety and divine vengeance.

Asterion: The Name the Mother Gave

It is worth pausing on a detail that is frequently overlooked in popular retellings of the myth but which carries considerable interpretive weight. The name “Minotaur” — compounded from Minos and tauros, the Greek word for bull — is a designation applied from without, a label that encodes the creature’s hybrid parentage and its association with the Cretan king. It is not the name by which the monster was known to its mother. Pasiphae, according to several ancient sources, named her child Asterion — “the starry one” — a name of remarkable tenderness and cosmic aspiration, evoking the constellation Taurus and situating the creature within the canopy of the heavens rather than in the dungeon of its eventual imprisonment. That a mother whose desire was the instrument of divine punishment should have named her monstrous offspring after the stars is one of the myth’s most quietly devastating details, investing the Minotaur with a humanity — or at least a claim to identity beyond the purely monstrous — that its subsequent treatment by King Minos and by the myth’s heroic tradition systematically denies it. Some scholars and literary interpreters have argued that this detail opens a space within the myth for a reading of the Minotaur not simply as a monster to be destroyed but as a victim of circumstances entirely beyond its control — born into monstrosity through no fault of its own, condemned to darkness and to a diet of human flesh by the crime of a father who was himself the original transgressor.

*Roman-era marble sculpture copy of the Minotaur

The Labyrinth: Daedalus, Containment, and the Architecture of Shame

King Minos, confronted with the existence of his wife’s monstrous offspring, faced a problem simultaneously practical and political. The Minotaur, as it grew, became increasingly dangerous and uncontrollable — its appetite for human flesh rendering cohabitation with ordinary society impossible, its existence a source of profound shame to the Cretan royal house. The solution Minos devised was characteristically oblique: not destruction, but concealment. He commissioned Daedalus — the same craftsman whose mechanical ingenuity had facilitated the creature’s conception — to construct the Labyrinth, an underground palace of such bewildering complexity and such carefully engineered confusion that no one who entered it could hope to find their way out unaided.

Ancient sources differ in their descriptions of the Labyrinth’s precise nature and dimensions, but they are consistent in presenting it as a structure that represents a kind of architectural paradox: a building whose purpose was not to house its occupant in comfort but to imprison it in perpetual disorientation, designed not for habitation but for the prevention of escape. Pliny the Elder, in his Naturalis Historia, discusses the Labyrinth as one of the great architectural wonders of the ancient world, drawing comparisons with the Egyptian labyrinth at Hawara and noting the tradition that the Cretan original was a structure of extraordinary technical sophistication. Ovid, in the Metamorphoses, renders the construction of the Labyrinth with characteristic brilliance, describing Daedalus confusing even himself with the intricacy of the passages he created — a detail that captures something essential about the structure’s character as a monument to deliberate confusion and disillusionment.

*Roman mosaic depicting Theseus slaying the Minotaur in the labyrinth

The connection of the Labyrinth to the archaeological site of the Palace of Knossos, excavated by the British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans from 1900 onwards, has been a subject of sustained scholarly discussion. The palace, which dates in its most elaborate form to the period around 1700 BCE and which was destroyed and rebuilt multiple times before its final abandonment around 1375 BCE, is a structure of remarkable complexity — its hundreds of interconnected rooms, its multiple storeys, its system of light wells and corridors creating precisely the kind of disorienting spatial experience that the mythological Labyrinth was said to embody. The prominence of bull imagery throughout the palace’s frescoes and decorative programme — including the celebrated fresco of the bull-leaper, in which athletic figures are depicted vaulting over charging bulls — has led many scholars to suggest that the myth of the Minotaur and the Labyrinth preserves, in mythologised form, a genuine cultural memory of Minoan Crete: its bull cult, its architectural sophistication, and perhaps even some historical reality of tribute payments or ritual sacrifice involving mainland Greeks. Evans himself was inclined to identify the palace with the mythological labyrinth, and whilst subsequent scholarship has treated this identification with greater caution, the structural and cultural correspondences remain striking.

*colour lithograph, a reconstruction of the Palace of Knossos in the 20th century BC

The Tribute of Athens: Political Subjugation and the Context of Heroism

The myth situates the confrontation between Theseus and the Minotaur within a specific political context that is essential to understanding its moral and civic dimensions. Athens, following the death of Androgeos — son of Minos, who had been killed in Attica under circumstances that ancient sources variously attribute to jealousy, to an ambush, or to an encounter with the Marathonian bull — was placed under a tribute obligation to Crete of singular cruelty. Every nine years, the city was required to send to Crete seven young men and seven young maidens, who were delivered into the Labyrinth as fodder for the Minotaur. Ancient sources including Plutarch in his Life of Theseus, Apollodorus, and Diodorus Siculus all record this tribute arrangement, though they differ on certain details, including whether the victims were selected by lottery or chosen by Minos himself.

The tribute is, in the mythological logic of the story, a form of collective punishment and political humiliation: Athens, one of the most celebrated city-states of the Greek world, was being forced to surrender its youth — the flower of its next generation — to serve as the food supply of a monster on behalf of a foreign king. The psychological and political weight of this arrangement can hardly be overstated. For an Athenian audience hearing or reading this myth, the tribute would have resonated as the ultimate expression of subjugation: not merely military defeat or political subordination, but the literal consumption of the city’s children as an emblem of a rival power’s shame. It is against this backdrop that Theseus’ decision to volunteer as one of the tributes — in some versions of the myth, he insists on being included in the cohort; in others, he is selected — must be understood. His mission is not simply one of personal heroic ambition but of civic liberation, an attempt to sever permanently the bond of humiliation that has been imposed upon his city.

Ariadne, Phaedra, and the Role of Love in the Hero’s Success

*Roman copy of a Greek marble bust of Euripides, 330 BC

Theseus’ arrival at Crete introduces into the myth a dimension of erotic complication that is as central to its structure as the heroic combat itself. Ariadne, daughter of Minos and therefore half-sister to the Minotaur, encountered Theseus and fell immediately and overwhelmingly in love with him — a passion that Apollodorus and other ancient sources attribute variously to the simple force of Theseus’ appearance and bearing, and to the intervention of Aphrodite, who is said in some accounts to have directed Ariadne’s love as part of a divine dispensation that would ensure Theseus’ success. Phaedra, the younger daughter, is associated with Theseus in certain versions of the broader mythological tradition, and would go on to become his wife in later life — an association whose tragic consequences are most fully explored in Euripides’ Hippolytus, where her destructive passion for her stepson brings about catastrophe. The presence of both daughters at this moment in the narrative gestures toward the larger web of erotic and familial catastrophe that surrounds the house of Minos, suggesting that the gods’ punishment of the king for his impiety extended well beyond the Minotaur itself.

*Sleeping Ariadne, a Roman marble sculpture copy from the 2nd century AD

It is Ariadne’s love, however, that is immediately and decisively consequential. Recognising that Theseus, however formidable, could not hope to navigate the Labyrinth unaided, she sought the assistance of Daedalus — its architect and therefore its only living authority on its internal logic — and obtained from him the solution: a ball of thread, which Theseus could unwind as he penetrated the maze, following its trail back to the entrance after the Minotaur had been killed. This device, simple in conception but profound in its implications, has generated centuries of interpretive commentary. The thread of Ariadne — the clew, a word that gives English its metaphor for the solution to a mystery — represents, at the most fundamental level, the imposition of linear intelligibility upon a structure whose entire design was predicated on the impossibility of such intelligibility. Theseus could not conquer the Labyrinth by the same qualities of strength and courage that served him against the Minotaur; he required, in addition, the feminine intelligence and devotion of Ariadne, without which his physical prowess would have been expended in darkness to no purpose. The myth, in this respect, quietly but insistently complicates the purely masculine heroic narrative: the hero’s success depends upon a woman’s love and a craftsman’s knowledge as much as upon his own formidable qualities.

*Roman fresco from Pompeii depicting Dionysus discovering a sleeping Ariadne, 1st century AD

Theseus descended into the Labyrinth, followed the thread through its bewildering passages, encountered the Minotaur in the heart of the maze, and killed it — in most ancient accounts, with his bare hands rather than a weapon, a detail that emphasises the purely physical nature of the encounter and the overwhelming superiority of heroic strength over monstrous power. He then retraced his path by means of Ariadne’s thread and emerged, leading the surviving Athenian tributes to freedom. The Minotaur was dead; the tribute was, in principle, ended; the long humiliation of Athens was avenged.

The Return: Betrayal, Forgetfulness, and the Death of Aegeus

The aftermath of Theseus’ triumph is shadowed, as so often in Greek mythology, by a series of events that qualify and complicate the heroic achievement. Theseus departed Crete with Ariadne, taking her with him as he had promised; but he abandoned her on the island of Naxos — an act for which ancient sources offer varying and not entirely satisfying explanations. Some accounts, including that of Plutarch, suggest that Theseus was visited on Naxos by Dionysus, who claimed Ariadne for himself; others imply that Theseus left her deliberately, or that he simply forgot her — the same quality of inattention and negligence that would shortly produce an even more catastrophic consequence. Dionysius’ claim on Ariadne is, in some tellings, presented as a genuine divine intervention that ultimately served her better than Theseus’ company would have; in others, her abandonment is the final act of a pattern of erotic exploitation that sits uneasily with the heroic nobility of the Labyrinth episode.

*detail depicting Dionysus and Ariadne, on a Greek red-figure calyx-krater, 400-375 BC

The death of Aegeus, Theseus’ father, has been treated at length in the preceding discussion of Plutarch’s synkrisis, and need only be summarised here: Theseus, sailing home in the intoxication of victory, failed to change his ship’s black sail to white as he had promised, and Aegeus, seeing the black sail from the Acropolis, threw himself into the sea in the belief that his son was dead. The sea that bears his name — the Aegean — is, in this reading, a monument to a father’s grief and a son’s negligence, a permanent geographical inscription of a preventable tragedy into the landscape of the Greek world.

The Myth’s Ancient Reception: Literary and Artistic Traditions

The story of Theseus and the Minotaur was among the most extensively treated subjects in ancient Greek and Roman literature and art. In addition to the prose accounts of Apollodorus and Diodorus Siculus, and the biographical treatment of Plutarch, the myth permeated ancient poetry, drama, and visual culture in ways that attest to its centrality within the broader mythological tradition. Catullus, in his sixty-fourth poem — one of the most accomplished and emotionally intense works of Latin poetry — devotes a substantial portion of the epyllion to the figure of Ariadne, abandoned on Naxos and crying out her reproaches to the retreating ships of Theseus, in a passage of extraordinary lyric power that presents the myth primarily from the perspective of the woman left behind rather than the hero who left her. Ovid, in the Heroides, gives Ariadne a voice of her own in an imagined letter to Theseus, reinforcing the tradition of reading the myth as a story not only of heroic triumph but of erotic betrayal and female suffering.

In visual art, the myth was a perennial favourite from the archaic period onwards. Attic black-figure and red-figure pottery frequently depicted Theseus’ combat with the Minotaur, the unrolling of Ariadne’s thread, and the abandonment on Naxos, presenting these episodes with a variety of emphases and interpretive accents that reflect the myth’s availability for multiple readings. The Minotaur was represented, in the majority of surviving images, as a creature of straightforwardly monstrous character — bull-headed, powerful, threatening — though a small number of ancient representations present it in more ambiguous postures, as if acknowledging the creature’s complex origins and the pathos of its imprisonment.

*Ariadne in Naxos by Evelyn De Morgan, 1877

The Modern Reception: Picasso, Psychology, and Popular Culture

The myth’s vitality has not diminished in the modern period; if anything, its range of application has expanded, as successive cultural moments have found in the story of the Labyrinth a vehicle for their own preoccupations and anxieties. No modern artist engaged with the myth more persistently or more profoundly than Pablo Picasso, for whom the figure of the Minotaur became, across several decades of work, a complex and shifting personal symbol. The Minotaur appears throughout Picasso’s graphic work of the 1930s — in the Vollard Suite of etchings, in numerous drawings and paintings — as a figure of ambivalent power: sometimes violent and predatory, sometimes tender and vulnerable, sometimes blind and helpless, always saturated with an intensity of psychological meaning that reflects Picasso’s identification of the creature with the darker and more uncontrollable aspects of masculine desire and creative energy.

*Minotauromachy by Pablo Picasso, 1935

It is important to note, however, that Guernica — perhaps the most celebrated of all Picasso’s works — is not strictly a Minotaur painting, though it shares with the Minotaur series a related symbolic vocabulary and was produced in the same period. Guernica, painted in 1937 in response to the Nazi bombing of the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, employs the bull as one of its central figures; but this bull is not the Minotaur, and the painting’s symbolism, while clearly informed by Picasso’s sustained engagement with the imagery of the Minoan myth, operates in a distinct and specifically political register. To describe Guernica simply as a Minotaur painting risks misrepresenting both the work and its context; what can accurately be said is that Picasso’s immersion in the mythological material gave him an iconographic vocabulary — the bull, the wounded horse, the screaming figures — that he deployed, transformed, in the service of contemporary political testimony.

Guernica by Pablo Picasso, 1937

More broadly, the myth has demonstrated a remarkable capacity for adaptation across the full range of modern media. In literature, Jorge Luis Borges’ short story The House of Asterion — pointedly adopting the Minotaur’s maternal name — presents the myth from the creature’s own perspective, in a prose poem of haunting interiority that transforms the monster into a lonely philosopher awaiting, in his infinite house, a redeemer he half-welcomes and half-fears. The story is perhaps the most penetrating modern literary engagement with the myth’s ethical ambiguities, and one of the finest examples of mythological reinterpretation in twentieth-century fiction. In cinema and television, the myth has been adapted repeatedly, from sword-and-sandal spectacles to contemporary fantasy series, testifying to its continued hold on popular imagination even when — perhaps especially when — it is translated into idioms far removed from its origins.

Conclusion: The Labyrinth as Enduring Symbol

*Minotaur with Dead Mare in front of a Cave by Pablo Picasso, 1936

The myth of Theseus and the Minotaur endures because it speaks, with a directness that transcends its historical and cultural origins, to experiences and anxieties that are perennially human. The Labyrinth, as a structure and as a symbol, has become one of the most versatile and generative images in the Western cultural tradition: a figure for the bewildering complexity of the unconscious mind, for the bureaucratic or political systems that entrap individuals, for the intricate and disorienting nature of desire itself. The Minotaur, simultaneously monster and victim, the product of divine punishment and human transgression, embodies a moral complexity that the myth never resolves — and perhaps cannot resolve — because it reflects a genuine and irresolvable tension in the human relationship to the monstrous: the recognition that what we fear and destroy may also, in some sense, be what we have ourselves created and condemned.

Blind Minotaur Guided by a Young Girl in the Night from the Vollard Suite by Pablo Picasso, 1934

Theseus’ victory in the Labyrinth is real, but it is shadowed from the moment of its achievement by a series of failures — the abandonment of Ariadne, the death of Aegeus, the larger pattern of negligence and betrayal that qualifies his heroism without cancelling it. The thread of Ariadne finds the way out; but no thread leads back to what was left behind in the dark.

Biographies of Ixion, Meleager, Busiris, Antaeus and Philoctetes

Ixion

Ixion was king of the Lapiths, the most ancient tribe of Thessaly. His parentage is unclear across the ancient sources. He was variously described as a son of Ares, or Leonteus, or Antion and Perimele, or the notorious evildoer Phlegyas, whose name itself connotes something fiery. The question of his parentage has direct consequences for the status of his son Pirithous: Pirithous was either his son or his stepson, depending on whether Zeus was considered his father, as the sky-god himself claims to Hera in Book 14 of Homer’s Iliad. 

*relief sculpture depicting Theseus, Pirithous and Heracles during their journey to the Underworld

Ixion married Dia, the daughter of Eioneus, and when he married her he promised to give his father-in-law a valuable present. However, he refused to pay the bride price in full, which led Eioneus to seize some of Ixion’s mares as security. Ixion concealed his resentment and invited Deioneus to a great feast at Larissa. When Deioneus arrived, Ixion pushed him into a bed of burning coals and wood. The neighbouring princes were so offended by this act of treachery, and by Ixion’s violation of the laws of xenia — the Greek code of guest-friendship and hospitality — that they refused to perform the rituals which would have cleansed him of his guilt. As a result of this act and the pollution that followed, Ixion went mad. By killing his father-in-law, Ixion was reckoned the first man guilty of kin-slaying in all of Greek mythology. From this point on he lived the life of an outcast, shunned by everyone for the crime of parricide. 

The violation of xenia is central to understanding Ixion’s significance. Of all the attributes Zeus was known for, he was originally the deity who presided over the custom of xenia, known in this capacity as Zeus Xenios. Ixion’s crimes thus offended not merely human convention but the divine order itself. 

*Ixion by Jusepe de Ribera, 1876 AD

Zeus, however, took pity on Ixion and brought him to Olympus, introducing him at the table of the gods. Instead of being grateful, Ixion grew lustful for Hera, Zeus’s wife — a further and even more grievous violation of the laws of guest-friendship. Zeus, wishing to verify the truth of what he suspected, fashioned a cloud to look like Hera; this cloud became known as Nephele. When Ixion lay with the phantom and then boasted that he had slept with Hera, Zeus punished him. 

*Ixion Embracing the Cloud by Carlo Maratta

The fullest poetic account of this episode is given by Pindar in his Second Pythian Ode (composed around 476–468 BC), who describes how Ixion, in his ignorance, chased a deception and lay with a cloud whose form resembled the supreme celestial goddess, daughter of Cronus. Zeus set it as a trap, a beautiful misery, and Ixion brought upon himself an inescapable bond — a four-spoked fetter — and received the message that warns the whole world. Pindar deployed the example of Ixion as a warning applicable to Hiero I of Syracuse, the tyrant to whom the ode was addressed. 

*Roman marble bust of Pindar, a copy of a 5th century Greek original

According to Pindar, the union of Ixion and Nephele produced a son called Centaurus. Centaurus then fathered the centaurs by mating with the wild Magnesian mares of Mount Pelion, after which the centaurs were raised by the daughters of Chiron. Pindar describes this offspring as a monstrous breed honoured neither by men nor by the laws of the gods — a creature Nephele raised and named Centaurus, who mated with the Magnesian mares in the foothills of Pelion, giving rise to a horde resembling both parents: equine below, human above. Because of this descent, the centaurs were also referred to as the Ixionidae. The story is also told by Pseudo-Apollodorus in the Epitome (1.20), by Diodorus Siculus (4.69.3–5), by Hyginus in the Fabulae (62), by Virgil in the Georgics (Book 4) and the Aeneid (Book 6), and by Ovid in the Metamorphoses (Book 12). 

*Attic terracotta lekythos, depicting a Centaur in battle, 575-550 BC

For the transgression of attempting to sleep with his wife — a crime Zeus regarded as greater than murder — Ixion was expelled from Olympus and blasted with a thunderbolt. Zeus ordered Hermes to bind him to a winged fiery wheel that spun without ceasing. In the earlier tradition the wheel rolled endlessly through the heavens, but in later myth Ixion was transferred to Tartarus, the deepest part of the Underworld. Ixion was a figure also known to the Etruscans: he is depicted bound to the spoked wheel on the back of a bronze mirror, dated to around 460–450 BC, now held in the British Museum. Scholars have further suggested that the fiery wheel to which Ixion is bound may have been intended as a representation of the 22° solar halo, the optical phenomenon formed by ice crystals in the atmosphere that encircles the sun like a radiant ring. 

*Etruscan bronze circular mirror depicting Ixion, 4th century BC

The only respite Ixion received from this eternal torment came when Orpheus descended into the Underworld to retrieve Eurydice and played his lyre — at which moment the wheel briefly ceased its spinning. The story of Ixion thus stands as one of Greek mythology’s most vivid cautionary tales: a man who was pardoned for the first murder ever committed, admitted into the company of the gods themselves, and yet who compounded every grace shown to him with a fresh act of betrayal, earning a punishment designed to endure for eternity.

*Attic black-figure amphora depicting Orpheus playing his lyre to Athena

Meleager

In Greek mythology, Meleager was a hero venerated in his temenos at Calydon in Aetolia, and his story is first mentioned in Book 9 of Homer’s Iliad, where it forms part of the oral tradition likely far older than that text. He was the son of Althaea and either King Oeneus of Calydon or, in an alternative tradition, the god Ares. According to Hyginus in the Fabulae, both Oeneus and Ares slept with Althaea on the same night, creating the ambiguity that runs through later accounts. This dual parentage made him a Calydonian prince of considerable prestige. 

*Roman marble sculpture copy of a 4th century Greek original by Skopas, depicting Meleager, 2nd century AD

At the moment of his birth, the circumstances of his death were already decided. When Meleager was born, the three Fates — Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos — appeared in the royal house. They sang his fate: Clotho declared he would be noble, Lachesis that he would be brave, but Atropos looked at a firebrand burning on the hearth and declared that he would live only as long as that brand remained unconsumed. This ominous declaration was delivered either immediately at birth or when Meleager was seven days old. Upon hearing this, Althaea leaped from her bed, extinguished the brand, and buried it in the middle of the palace so it could not be destroyed by fire. The account is corroborated by Diodorus Siculus in his Library of History (4.34.6), who records that the Moirai stood over Althaea in her sleep and told her that her son would die at the moment the brand in the fire was consumed, and that she consequently believed the safety of her child depended entirely upon the preservation of the brand. 

Meleager married Cleopatra, daughter of Idas, and was also numbered among the Argonauts. In some accounts he was even said to have slain Aeetes during the contest for the Golden Fleece. His siblings included Deianeira, Clymenus, Periphas, Agelaus, Thyreus, Gorge, Eurymede, and Melanippe, and he was said in some accounts to be the father of Parthenopeus and Polydora. 

*Detail of the Argo by Lorenzo Costa

The episode for which Meleager is best remembered was the hunt of the Calydonian Boar. One spring, when Oeneus was sacrificing the first fruits of the season to the gods, he accidentally omitted Artemis, goddess of the hunt. Enraged by this slight, Artemis sent a boar of unnatural size and strength to ruin the land of Calydon. Meleager was dispatched by his father to gather heroes from across Greece to hunt the creature. Among those he chose was Atalanta, a fierce huntress whom he loved, though the other hunters refused to go out alongside her until Meleager prevailed upon them. 

*Meleager, 4th century BC

During the hunt, two centaurs, Hylaeus and Rhoecus, attempted to rape Atalanta; Meleager killed them both. Atalanta then wounded the boar, and Meleager killed it. He awarded her the hide, since she had drawn the first blood. This sequence is described by Ovid in Metamorphoses (8.380) and by Pseudo-Apollodorus in the Bibliotheca (1.8.2), though the accounts differ in emphasis. In what became the most familiar tradition, Atalanta drew first blood while Meleager delivered the killing blow, and Meleager, having fallen in love with her, offered her the boar’s hide on the grounds that she had struck first. 

*Laconian black-figure cup by the Naucratis Painter, 555 BC

The sons of Thestius — Meleager’s uncles — considered it disgraceful that a woman should receive the trophy where men were involved, and took the skin from her, arguing it was properly theirs by right of birth since Meleager had chosen not to accept it himself. Outraged, Meleager slew the sons of Thestius and gave the skin to Atalanta a second time. Ovid names two of these uncles as Plexippus and Toxeus, while Apollodorus names Althaea’s brothers as Iphiclus, Evippus, Plexippus, and Eurypylus, and Hyginus gives yet another set of names.

*fresco depicting Meleager and Atalanta

When Althaea learned of the death of her brothers, deeply incensed, she burned the brand that had been hidden away since Meleager’s birth, and so made herself the cause of her son’s death. The manner of Meleager’s dying differed between sources: Homer’s Iliad mentions his death before the Trojan War but does not describe it directly, focusing instead on Althaea’s curse following the killing of her brother, after which Meleager withdrew from battle and the Curetes came close to sacking Calydon. The firebrand tradition, which dominates later accounts, is given in Bacchylides, Apollodorus, Ovid, and Hyginus. In Apollodorus’ account, both Althaea and Meleager’s wife Cleopatra took their own lives in the aftermath. 

*marble Roman sarcophagus depicting the Calydonian Boar Hunt

Meleager’s story does not end entirely with his death. In the Underworld, his shade was the only one that did not flee from Heracles, who had descended to retrieve Cerberus. In Bacchylides’ Ode V, Meleager appears still in his shining armour, so formidable that Heracles reached for his bow to defend himself. Heracles was moved to tears by Meleager’s account of his death; Meleager had left his sister Deianeira unwedded in his father’s house, and entreated Heracles to take her as his bride — an irony that Bacchylides leaves implicit, since the audience would have known that this union would ultimately prove fatal to Heracles. The encounter between Heracles and the shade of Meleager in the Underworld was also treated by Pindar in a fragment, though Bacchylides’ is the fuller surviving version.

*marble Roman copy depicting Meleager, 1st century AD

The myth carried enduring cultural weight. The story appeared also in the later epics the Ehoiai and the Minyas, and was a popular subject in Greek and Roman art from pottery decoration to sculpted sarcophagi. A famous statue of Meleager was carved by the sculptor Skopas in the fourth century BC, and he appears frequently on Greek vases and Roman sarcophagi in the setting of the Calydonian Hunt, with some vases and mirrors specifically depicting the scene of Meleager presenting the boar’s hide to Atalanta. The primary ancient sources for his myth are Homer’s Iliad (Book 9), Bacchylides (Ode V), Pseudo-Apollodorus (Bibliotheca 1.8.2–3), Diodorus Siculus (Library of History 4.34), Ovid (Metamorphoses 8.270–546), and Hyginus (Fabulae 171–174).

Busiris

Busiris was a king of Egypt, the son of Poseidon and, depending on the source, either Libya or Lysianassa, daughter of Epaphus. Pseudo-Apollodorus in the Bibliotheca (2.5.11) gives his mother as Lysianassa, while in Isocrates’ rhetorical declamation Busiris and in some other accounts she is named as Libya herself, or Anippe, daughter of the river-god Nilus. As Diodorus Siculus records in his Library of History (1.45), Busiris was held to be the founder of the line of kings at the great city of Thebes — the city the Greeks called the City of Zeus — and was regarded more broadly as a founder of Egyptian civilization. Isocrates, writing in the fourth century BC, went so far as to credit him in a parodic vein with an imagined model constitution superior even to Plato’s Republic, though this was an ironic rhetorical exercise rather than a sincere account.

The darker version of Busiris, preserved most fully by Pseudo-Apollodorus, turns on a prolonged famine. Egypt had been afflicted with nine consecutive years of drought and crop failure, and at length a learned seer named Phrasius arrived from Cyprus and declared that the dearth would cease if a foreign man were sacrificed to Zeus each year. Busiris took this oracle at its word, beginning by slaughtering Phrasius himself, and thereafter continued to sacrifice every stranger who set foot in Egypt. His children in various accounts included Amphidamas, named as his son by Pseudo-Apollodorus, and Melite, named as his daughter by Hyginus in the Fabulae (157).

*Attic red-figure stamens depicting Heracles and Busiris

The most celebrated episode involving Busiris was his encounter with Herakles, which was a popular subject among Athenian vase-painters of the early fifth century BC and was also dramatised by Euripides in a lost satyr-play. Herakles, travelling through Egypt on his quest for the golden apples of the Hesperides, was seized by Busiris’ attendants and brought bound to the altar. As Pseudo-Apollodorus narrates (Bibliotheca 2.5.11), Herakles burst his bonds at the last moment, slew Busiris, and killed his son Amphidamas alongside him. The story is also referenced by Hyginus (Fabulae 31), Ovid (Metamorphoses 9.182 and Ars Amatoria 1.647–652), and Diodorus Siculus (4.27.2–3), who adds that after killing Busiris, Herakles continued south up the Nile into Ethiopia.

*Herakles slaying King Busiris of Egypt, depicted on an ancient Greek vase, 500-450 BC

The myth attracted controversy even in antiquity. Herodotus (Histories 2.45) flatly denied that the Egyptians had ever practised human sacrifice, and Isocrates (Busiris 15) attempted to undermine the whole story by pointing out that Herakles must have lived far too late to have encountered a king of Busiris’ era. Others suggested the story was invented merely to characterise the people of the Egyptian town of Busiris as inhospitable, and that no such king had ever existed. Diodorus Siculus (Library of History 1.88) reported on the authority of the Egyptians themselves that Busiris was not the name of a king at all, but signified the tomb of Osiris, and that those sacrificed there were red-haired men of foreign appearance — a ritual with roots, it appears, in the myth of Osiris’ murder and dismemberment by the red-haired god Set.

Antaeus

Antaeus was the son of Poseidon, god of the sea, and Gaia, the earth goddess — a genealogy attested in Pindar (Isthmian Odes 4.52–55) and later confirmed by Apollodorus (Bibliotheca 2.5.11). This divine parentage was itself symbolically loaded: from his father he inherited immense physical strength and martial ferocity, while from his mother he drew something more dangerous still — an inexhaustible, renewable vitality rooted in the earth itself.

*Hercules Fighting with Antaeus by Francisco de Zurbaran

Antaeus made his home in the interior desert of Libya, a detail emphasised by Pindar, who locates his wrestling ground in the dust of that remote and hostile terrain. His wife was Tinge, a local goddess or heroine after whom the ancient city of Tingis — modern Tangier in Morocco — was believed to have been named. This detail is preserved by Plutarch, who in his Life of Sertorius (9) mentions the tradition that Antaeus was buried in the region, and that the city retained her name in memory of their union. By Tinge, Antaeus had two daughters: Alceis and Iphinoe, the latter of whom — according to a tradition recorded in various scholia — entered into an intimate relationship with Herakles himself, presumably in the aftermath of their fathers’ fatal encounter.

The defining characteristic of Antaeus was his practice of challenging all travellers who passed through Libya to a wrestling match. He was undefeated. The reason, Pindar tells us, was that so long as he remained in contact with Gaia — his mother, the earth — his strength was continuously replenished. This detail becomes the central dramatic and metaphysical crux of the myth: the earth itself was conspiring in his victories. Lucan, writing in the first century AD, offers the most elaborate surviving account of this power in his epic Pharsalia (4.593–660), describing how each time Antaeus was thrown to the ground he rose stronger than before, the earth pouring new vigour up through his limbs like a current.

*red-figured krater by Euphronius depicting Heracles and Antaeus, 515-510 BC

Antaeus did not simply defeat his opponents — he killed them. More striking still, he collected their skulls and used them as building material for a temple dedicated to his father Poseidon. This macabre detail — the skull-temple — is mentioned in the scholiasts on Pindar and appears in later mythographic tradition. It frames Antaeus not merely as a violent adversary but as a figure of impious excess: the skulls of the dead, which in Greek religious culture demanded proper burial rites, were instead repurposed as monuments to divine vanity. There is only one exception in his tally of kills: Herakles.

*Statue of Hercules and the Centaur Nessus by Giambologna, 1595-1599 AD

The encounter between Herakles and Antaeus came during the hero’s eleventh labour — his journey to the Garden of the Hesperides at the western edge of the world to retrieve the golden apples. Apollodorus (Bibliotheca 2.5.11) provides the canonical prose account, and Pindar (Isthmian Odes 4) the earliest poetic allusion. On his westward route through Libya, Herakles was inevitably challenged by Antaeus. What distinguishes Herakles’ response is his intelligence as much as his strength: he recognised, presumably through divine foreknowledge or shrewd observation, that throwing or pinning his opponent to the ground would be useless — indeed counterproductive, since each fall renewed Antaeus through contact with his mother.

*terracotta sculpture depicting Herakles and Antaeus, 16th century

Lucan’s Pharsalia dramatises this realisation with great vividness. After repeatedly hurling Antaeus down and watching him rise ever more powerful, Herakles changes strategy. He seizes Antaeus, lifts him bodily off the ground — severing him from Gaia — and crushes him in a bear hug while he is suspended in the air, unable to draw sustenance from the earth. Antaeus weakens and dies, cut off from the source of his being. Lucan emphasises the pathos and strangeness of this: the hero must deny his opponent the very ground beneath his feet.

*sculpture from the Hellenistic period depicting Herakles and Antaeus

The myth lends itself to allegorical readings, and ancient writers were not slow to explore them. The philosopher Origen (Contra Celsum 4.67) glanced at the tradition, and later Neoplatonist commentators read in the story a conflict between the celestial and the chthonic — between a hero aligned with Zeus and Olympian order, and a creature whose power was entirely bound up in the material, subterranean world. Herakles’ victory, on this reading, figures the triumph of reason or spirit over a brute vitality that can only persist through contact with the lower realm.

The story’s geographical grounding in Libya also connects it to a broader tradition of Herakles’ western adventures — his encounters with Geryon, Atlas, and the Hesperides — in which the far west functions as a space of primordial otherness, populated by pre-Olympian forces that must be overcome before civilised order can extend to the edges of the world.

Philoctetes

Philoctetes was the son of King Poeas of Meliboea — a city on the coast of Thessaly — and Methone, though some traditions name his mother differently or omit her entirely. His father Poeas was himself a figure of some mythological significance, counted among the Argonauts, and the family’s Thessalian roots place Philoctetes within the broader heroic geography of northern Greece. The fullest ancient treatments of his myth are found in Sophocles’ tragedy Philoctetes (409 BC), the mythographic summary of Apollodorus (Bibliotheca 3.10.8, Epitome 3.27, 5.8), and the summary of the lost Little Iliad preserved by Proclus, alongside passing references in Pindar and later authors.

*Attic red-figure lekythos depicting Philoctetes on Lemnos, 420 BC

The defining inheritance of Philoctetes’ life was the bow and arrows of Herakles. The manner in which he came to possess them is itself a story of extraordinary service and trust. When Herakles, poisoned by the blood of the centaur Nessus soaked into the shirt sent by his wife Deianeira, was consumed by agonies he could not endure and could not escape, he had himself carried to Mount Oeta and commanded that a funeral pyre be built. Only Philoctetes — or in some versions his father Poeas — was willing to light it, the other bystanders refusing out of reverence or horror. As his reward for this act of loyalty and courage, Herakles bequeathed him his bow and the arrows dipped in the Hydra’s blood, weapons that never missed their mark. This episode is alluded to in Sophocles’ Philoctetes (670–675) and treated more fully in Apollodorus (Bibliotheca 2.7.7). It is worth stressing the significance of lighting the pyre: in Greek religious understanding, this act was not merely practical but pious, facilitating the hero’s apotheosis, his passage from mortal suffering to divine status on Olympus. Philoctetes’ willingness to perform it, when others held back, marks him as a man of exceptional reverence and loyalty.

*Wounded Philoctetes Surrenders to his Pain by Jean Baptiste Carpeaux, 1852

Philoctetes was also among the suitors of Helen of Sparta — the great assembly of Greek heroes who competed for her hand, described in the Catalogue of Ships in Homer’s Iliad (2.716–725), where Philoctetes is named as leader of seven ships from the Thessalian coast. All suitors had taken the oath of Tyndareus, proposed by Odysseus, by which each man swore to defend the successful suitor against any wrong done to him in respect of the marriage. When Helen was taken to Troy by Paris, this oath bound Philoctetes and all the rest to join the expedition for her retrieval. The Trojan War was therefore, for Philoctetes, both a matter of honour and a legal obligation.

*Philoctetes on Lemnos by Jean-Germain Drouais, 1788 AD

Before the Greeks even reached Troy, however, disaster struck. During the voyage, the Greek fleet put in at the island of Chryse — or in some accounts Tenedos — and Philoctetes was bitten on the foot by a snake. The wound festered catastrophically and would not heal, producing a stench and cries of agony so unbearable that the Greeks, on the advice of Odysseus and the Atreidae, resolved to abandon him. Sophocles’ tragedy dramatises the bitterness this abandonment planted in Philoctetes with great psychological depth: stranded on the wild island of Lemnos, alone and in chronic pain for ten years, with no company but the cliffs and the sea, his resentment curdled into something close to a defining feature of his character. The wounding by the snake was sometimes understood as divine punishment — sent by Hera as retribution for Philoctetes’ role in facilitating Herakles’ deification, which had advanced the interests of Zeus’s son against her will. During his exile, command of his contingent passed to Medon.

*Philoctetes on the Island of Lemnos by Guillaume Guillon Lethière

The crisis that forced the Greeks to retrieve Philoctetes came in the tenth year of the war. The seer Helenus — son of King Priam — was captured by Odysseus and, under duress, revealed the conditions necessary for Troy’s fall. Among them, as Apollodorus records (Epitome 5.8), was the requirement that the Greeks fight with the bow and arrows of Herakles. Without them, victory was impossible. Odysseus and Diomedes (though some versions name Neoptolemus, as in Sophocles) were sent to Lemnos to retrieve both the weapons and their keeper.

*Odysseus and Neoptolemus Take Heracles’ Bow and Arrows from Philoctetes by François Xavier Fabre, 1800

The scene of their arrival on Lemnos, as Sophocles dramatises it, bristles with moral difficulty. Odysseus, finding a man he had abandoned to a decade of solitude and pain, could not simply ask for the bow — he resorted to deception, sending Neoptolemus ahead with a false story to win Philoctetes’ trust before taking the weapons. When Philoctetes discovered the trick he was incandescent, and Sophocles’ play turns on the question of whether ends justify means — whether Odysseus’ strategy, however effective, is compatible with heroic honour. In Sophocles’ version it is Herakles himself, appearing as a divine figure (deus ex machina) at the play’s close, who breaks the deadlock: he commands Philoctetes to leave Lemnos, promising that his wound will be healed by the sons of Asclepius — the physician heroes Machaon and Podalirius — and that glory awaits him at Troy.

*Philoctetes Aiming the Bow of Hercules at Odysseus by Asmus Jacob Carstens, 1790

Once at Troy, Philoctetes was healed, as promised, by Machaon or Podalirius — a detail recorded in Apollodorus and consistent with the Asclepiads’ role as the pre-eminent healers of the heroic world. Restored to health, he proved a devastating archer. The Little Iliad and various mythographic sources credit Philoctetes with the killing of Paris, shot with the arrows of Herakles — a death that was both militarily decisive and personally symbolic, since it was Paris who had started the war. A separate and murkier tradition concerns the death of Priam: some sources suggest Philoctetes killed the aged king, with a vivid account in which four successive arrows struck different parts of the king’s body before the fatal shot. This version, however, is contested; other traditions give Priam’s death to Neoptolemus, who slays him at the altar of Zeus in a scene of shocking impiety described in the Sack of Troy and referenced in Virgil’s Aeneid (2.506–558). Both cannot be right, and ancient sources themselves acknowledged the uncertainty.

*The Wounded Philoctetes by Nicolai Abildgaard, 1775

Philoctetes was reportedly among the warriors concealed within the Trojan Horse — the stratagem attributed to Odysseus and described in the Odyssey (4.271–289, where Menelaus and Helen recall it), and at greater length in Virgil and Quintus of Smyrna’s Posthomerica. When the Horse disgorged its men in the darkness of the city’s last night, Philoctetes fought in the slaughter that followed, killing many prominent Trojans.

*The Trojan Horse by Henri Paul Motte, 1874

What became of Philoctetes after Troy is genuinely unclear, and the divergence of the traditions is itself significant. In one account he settled in southern Italy, specifically in the region of Magna Graecia — Strabo (Geography 6.1.3) preserves the tradition that Philoctetes founded several cities there, including Petelia and Crimissa, and dedicated his bow in a temple of Apollo. He is said to have died peacefully in that western land, honoured as a founder-hero. In the contrasting tradition he perished in later fighting, dying in battle rather than in retirement. The two versions reflect a broader pattern in the nostoi — the varied and often tragic homecomings of the Greek heroes — in which the afterlife of the war could lead to either a hard-won peace or a continuation of suffering beyond the fall of Troy itself.

Cassandra

Cassandra was a daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba of Troy. In Homer’s Iliad, she is described as the most beautiful of Priam’s daughters, and this beauty is central to the myth of her curse. Hector was her older brother, famed as the greatest hero of the Trojan War — Homer calls him the “tamer of horses” and “breaker of men.” Paris was therefore another of her brothers, and Helenus, the seer, was her fraternal twin brother (not sister, as is sometimes mistakenly rendered — the twins were of opposite sexes, each gifted with prophetic powers). Because of her lineage, Cassandra was not only a princess but a priestess of Apollo at Troy.

*terracotta amphora depicting the death of Priam, attributed to the Nikoxenos Painter, 500 BC

Cassandra foresaw that the destruction of Troy would take place and knew of the catastrophe it would cause if Paris journeyed to Sparta and abducted Helen. In Euripides’ Trojan Women, Cassandra speaks with eerie clarity about the chain of ruin that Paris would set in motion, declaring that the Trojans will fight and die not for their own land but for a foreign woman. However, Paris went to Sparta in spite of her warnings, seizing Helen and triggering the sequence of events that would begin the Trojan War. The prophet Helenus also foresaw the dangers of the voyage, but Paris ignored both siblings.

*Roman marble relief depicting Paris and Helen in consultation with the gods, 100 BC-100 AD

In fact, Cassandra warned a number of different people about a number of different things in a number of different places, and none of those she advised heeded her. Her warnings and predictions were quite extraordinary. She alerted the Trojans to the Greeks concealed inside the Trojan Horse; she foretold Odysseus’ long and tortured wanderings after the war’s end; she predicted Clytemnestra and Aegisthus’ murder of Agamemnon and her own death alongside him. Most remarkably, she prophesied that Aeneas would survive the fall of Troy and journey westward to Italy to found a new nation — a tradition elaborated by Virgil in the Aeneid, where Aeneas’ destiny to become the ancestor of Rome is divinely ordained. In Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Cassandra even foresaw the ancient curse that had haunted the House of Atreus long before Agamemnon’s death, naming the children slaughtered by Thyestes and presenting the whole tragedy as part of a cycle of inherited bloodshed.

*calyx krater depicting the death of Agamemnon, attributed to the Dokimasia Painter, 460 BC

The Curse of Apollo

The most famous myth surrounding Cassandra involves Apollo. According to one tradition, Apollo offered Cassandra the gift of prophecy in exchange for her sexual favours. She accepted the gift but then refused to fulfil her side of the bargain. Since divine gifts, once bestowed, cannot be revoked, Apollo was unable to strip her of the power of foresight. Instead, he cursed her so that her prophecies, though entirely true, would never be believed by anyone who heard them.

*Apollo Lykeios by Praxiteles, 1st century AD – 2nd century AD

A variant preserved in the mythographer Hyginus (Fabulae, 93) offers a different account. In this version, Cassandra and her twin brother Helenus were left as infants in the temple of Apollo at Thymbraeum. When their parents came to collect them the following morning, they found the children with serpents licking their ears — a detail that recalls the story of how Melampus, the mythical seer, was also granted prophetic powers by serpents. On this reading, both twins received the gift of prophecy through divine intervention rather than through any transaction with Apollo, though Cassandra alone was subsequently cursed.

The pain these events caused Cassandra was immense. She was dismissed as a madwoman by both her family and the people of Troy. Her father Priam, unable to account for her frenzied utterances in any other way, had her locked away in a guarded chamber, where she was treated as deranged.

In Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Cassandra gives voice to her anguish with some of the most striking verse in all of Greek tragedy:

Apollo, Apollo!
God of all ways, but only Death’s to me,
Once and again, O thou, Destroyer named,
Thou hast destroyed me, thou, my love of old!

Her sense of guilt and betrayal is also captured in a fragment preserved by the scholiast tradition:

I consented [to marriage] to Loxias [Apollo] but broke my word. Ever since that fault I could persuade no one of anything.

The epithet Loxias — meaning “the Oblique” — is highly charged here. It was commonly used of Apollo in his capacity as a giver of oracles, and there is a bitter irony in the fact that Cassandra, the woman who speaks only the literal truth, is in thrall to the god whose defining characteristic is ambiguity and indirection.

*Roman marble herma of Aeschylus, 30 BC

The Trojan Horse

Cassandra’s efforts to warn the Trojan people about the Greek soldiers concealed within the Wooden Horse were desperate and unavailing. As the Trojans celebrated what they believed to be their deliverance, she attempted repeatedly to make them aware of the danger hidden inside the structure they had dragged within their walls. They mocked and ignored her. According to one tradition, she was not alone in her suspicions: the priest Laocoön also warned the Trojans, famously declaring — in Virgil’s account — “I fear the Greeks, even bearing gifts.” He too was disregarded. The gods, who had determined that Troy should fall, sent two great sea-serpents to kill Laocoön and his sons, an act that the Trojans interpreted as a sign that his warning was impious.

*Laocoön and His Sons, 200 BC – 70 AD

In some accounts, Cassandra seized an axe and a torch and charged toward the Horse in an attempt to break it open or set it ablaze herself, intent on forcing the Trojans to see what lay within. The Trojans overpowered and restrained her — to the profound relief of the Greek soldiers crouching inside. Her words, as reported in Quintus of Smyrna’s Posthomerica, were unambiguous: she declared that within the Horse were armed men, that fire and slaughter would come upon Troy that very night, and that she could see in her mind’s eye the faces of the Greek heroes — Odysseus, Diomedes, Anticleon — concealed in the darkness of its belly. Still no one listened.

*The Procession of the Trojan Horse into Troy by Giovanni-Battista Tiepolo, 1760

Two men, Othronus and Coroebus, had journeyed to Troy’s aid during the war in the hope of winning Cassandra’s hand in marriage, offering their military service as a bride-price. Priam accepted Othronus’ offer. Both men died in the fighting before they could claim her, a further mark of the ruin that proximity to Cassandra — or rather, proximity to the truth she embodied — seemed to entail.

The Rape by Ajax and the Sack of Troy

After Troy fell, Cassandra fled to the temple of Athena to seek sanctuary. There she clung to the goddess’s ancient wooden cult-statue (the Palladion), a sacred object believed to guarantee the city’s safety. The lesser Ajax — Ajax son of Oïleus, distinct from the great Ajax son of Telamon — tore her away from the statue and raped her on the temple floor.

*detail from red-figure cup depicting Ajax abducting Cassandra by the Kodros Painter

This act was regarded in antiquity as one of the gravest sacrilegious crimes of the entire war. Cassandra was a hiketis, a suppliant under the protection of the goddess, and the assault had been committed in Athena’s own sanctuary. The Greeks, though horrified, failed to punish Ajax adequately, an omission that cost them dearly. The Odyssey (III.135–136) and Euripides’ Trojan Women both allude to the divine wrath it provoked. Athena, enraged by the desecration of her temple, withdrew her favour from the Greeks and appealed to Zeus and Poseidon to punish them on their homeward voyage. Ajax himself, according to Homer (Odyssey, IV.499–511), was wrecked on the rocks of the Gyraean Crags while sailing home; he boasted that he had survived in spite of the gods, whereupon Poseidon split the rock he clung to and drowned him in the sea. His death was thus visited upon him jointly by Athena and Poseidon, a fitting retribution for a crime that had offended both the goddess of wisdom and the sanctity of the sea.

*Death of Ajax by Henri Auguste Calixte Cesar Serrur, 1820

Cassandra and Agamemnon

Following the sack of Troy, the Greek commander Agamemnon took Cassandra as his war-prize and concubine, bringing her back with him to Mycenae. During the ten years of Agamemnon’s absence at war, his wife Clytemnestra — nursing her grief over the sacrifice of their daughter Iphigenia at Aulis, and her resentment of her husband’s prolonged abandonment — had taken his cousin Aegisthus as her lover. Together they plotted Agamemnon’s murder.

*pottery fragment depicting Agamemnon seated while holding a sceptre, 5th century BC

Cassandra foresaw it all. In Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, among the most powerful scenes in surviving Greek drama, Cassandra arrives at Mycenae in Agamemnon’s chariot and is gripped by prophetic visions of overwhelming intensity. She sees the palace for what it is: a house drenched in old blood, haunted by the murdered children of Thyestes. She sees the net being prepared for Agamemnon, the bath, the blow. She foretells her own death in the same breath. The Chorus of Argive elders understand none of it, or understand it too late. In the end, Cassandra walks through the doors of the palace knowing precisely what awaits her inside.

*Cassandra by Max Klinger, late 19th century

Clytemnestra murdered both Agamemnon and Cassandra. Their children — Teledamus and Pelops — were also killed, though sources differ on who struck the blow. Some ancient traditions attribute this to Aegisthus rather than Clytemnestra. Pausanias (Description of Greece, II.16.6) records that Cassandra was buried at Mycenae, and that her tomb was still shown there in his day, along with those of Agamemnon and other victims of the palace’s violence. A cenotaph in her honour also existed at Amyclae, near Sparta — a reminder that her story, like her prophecies, had echoes across the entire Greek world.

A day in the life of a Flamen Martialis on duty

He awoke before sunrise and began by undergoing all of the necessary ablutions one must who is bound by sacred law. He started by bathing his hands using water supplied by a young servant boy, ritually pure because of the tenderness of his years. Following this, he began to dress into ceremonial garments laid out before him; a purple edged toga woven from the whitest of wools around his shoulders, an apex upon his head, and knot free sandals for his feet. Where his toga required fastening, wooden fasteners were fitted. He ensured that throughout the morning he would not come into contact with any impure things, ensuring his ritual purity. All of these precautions were necessary because a major public sacrifice to Mars was due to take place because the Senate having declared a public holiday, so large crowds of people would soon be gathering in order to witness the ceremony.

*bust of a Flamen Martialis (Priest of Mars), 3rd century AD

Leaving his home at dawn, he wandered through the Forum, engaging in respectful interactions with citizens; each person’s gaze as unique as his own, all inquiring as to a different purpose.  As he walked further, he observed in the direction of the Temple of Mars, the sacrificial bull being prepared by the victimarii, an animal chosen carefully by the pontifices. He noted the bull’s perfect majesty, its sinuous form emphasised by its decoration, gold leaf and ribbons. Once at the ceremonial site, he fixed his gaze upon a nearby augur examining a flock of birds, raised his lituus to the sky and proclaimed that the auspices were favourable.

*Preparations for a Sacrifice, a Roman marble relief, 2nd century AD

Ascending the temple’s steps, a tibicen played with a soft tone to his right, drowning out the sound of both the boisterous crowd and any noises the bull might make in anguish. The crowd had amassed; generals, senators and soldiers could be seen clustered together as he raised his limbs skyward and began his passionate invocation. Then, at the altar he began to sprinkle mola salsa upon the bull’s head and the surrounding earth. Onto the bull’s back was poured a libation of wine and, as the animal began to nod, the victimarius stepped forward, bashing its head with a hammer before cutting its throat with a glittering bronze blade. A bronze bowl was filled with blood from the bull’s neck as the haruspex appeared, who was handed a board of warm and sultry entrails, the liver and other organs. He examined them carefully with unwavering focus before he soberly proclaimed: ‘All signs are favourable’. The slaughter had gone smoothly; the bull’s actions and its insides were shown to be pure and worthy of the ceremony’s proceeding.

*image depicting a haruspex at work

The sacred portions were burned on the altar and the smoke rose upward toward the gods. The edible meat was taken away to be shared out in a sacred feast amongst the worthy attendees. A meaty aroma began to swell. The sacrifice was complete.

The street filled with the sound of music as revelry ensued in the surrounding areas. Before his duty was done and he could retreat to within the temple, he recited the ceremonies’ closing prayers. His voice rang out and was received by those in the crowd with bright eyes. Afternoon had come and all had nearly reached an end. All that remained for him was to perform a number of private rites and to take account of the day’s events in the priestly annals.

*Roman mosaic depicting street musicians, found near Pompeii

As day faded into night, he enjoyed a solemn dinner with his peers before performing his final purification rituals and uttering an almost inaudible prayer to the gods to whom his day and his entire being was, and forever would be, dedicated and in service of.

Greek festivals: The Great Panathenaia and the City Dionysia

The Great Panathenaia:

The Great Panathenaia was a festival held every four years from 566BC as a celebration of the goddess Athena’s birthday, the divine protector and patron of Athens. Every year an annual (lesser) Panathenaia was held which was much less elaborate and on a smaller scale than the ‘Great’ Panathenaia held every four years. Nevertheless, the festival was comprised of a number of religious rituals, athletic contests, musical competitions and civic celebration. The Great Panathenaia was celebrated in Hekatombion, the first month in the Athenian calendar, and had a duration of up to 8 days.

*a section of the Parthenon frieze, part of the Elgin Marbles, 5th century BC

On the first day, musical and rhapsodic contests were held. This included kithara playing accompanied by singing, aulos playing, rhapsodic recitations and competitive performances of Homeric poetry taken primarily from his great works the Iliad and the Odyssey. These artistic events celebrated and recognized Athens’ cultural renown.

*black figure vase painting depicting a singer and an aulos player , 6th century BC

On day two, athletic contests for boys and young people took place. Such contests included wrestling, boxing, pankration, running races and pentathlon, all of which promoted young physical brilliance and a preparedness for conflict.

*portion of a Greek black figure vase depicting a running race

On the third day, contests which took place on day two amongst youths were performed by fully grown males. These physical competitions were extremely intensive and dangerous, true displays of Roman male might and primal power. One of the prizes awarded to individuals who won these contests included a Panathenaic amphorae filled with sacred olive oil from Athena’s groves.

*marble relief, the base of a funerary kouros found in the Karameikos area, depicting athletes wrestling, approx. 510-500 BC

On day four, equestrian contests occurred, usually at the Hippodrome or other spacious, open areas around the city. Events included chariot races (between 2 and 4 horse teams), individual mounted races, and apobates races, which involved a rider jumping off his horse and running beside the moving chariot before jumping back on, a remarkable feat of endurance. Those who participated in such contests were wealthy Athenians rich enough to afford horses and teams. All prizes given in these events were awarded to the owner of the horse which won, not the rider. Equestrian events were used by elites as a way of exhibiting wealth and promoting a strong sense of patriotism.

*black-figured Panathenaic prize amphora depicting two horsemen racing

On the fifth day, tribal contests took place which were strictly limited to participation by Athenians from Attica’s ten tribes only. Events included euandria (a contest of strength, beauty and physical excellence), Pyrrhic dancing (martial dances performed in armour and accompanied by an aulos) and boat races (the most prominent being held in nearby Piraeus). Such events were intended to create a sense of tribal pride and unity.

*Attic red-figure pelite depicting men performing the ‘bibasis’ dance, 6th century BC

The evening before the festival procession took place, a two-mile torch race from the Dipylon Gate to the Altar on the Acropolis occurred, followed by an all-night celebration. The winner of this race was granted the tremendous honour of lighting the sacrificial flame for Athena’s sacrificial ceremony the next day.

*Greek black-figured prize amphora, 332-331 BC

On day six, the great procession and main sacrifice took place. The famous Panathenaic procession (pompe) depicted on the Parthenon’s frieze went from the Dipylon Gate through the Agora and onto the Acropolis. The participants included a wide range of priests, magistrates, musicians, elders, cavalry members and citizens. The procession was designed to accommodate a giant wheeled ship carrying a newly woven peplos which would be taken to the Acropolis and offered to the ancient Cult Statue of Athena Polias. Here, at the altar where only Athenians were permitted, one hundred oxen and several other animals were sacrificed in what was known as a hecatomb. Athena was given her share, then her priestesses, followed by the most senior Athenians in attendance, and finally, the meat was shared in a communal feast amongst citizens. These events marked the climax of the Great Panathenaia.

*marble relief, known as Plaque of the Ergastines, a fragment from the east frieze of the Parthenon, 445-438 BC

On the seventh day, extended additional athletic competitions took place such as apobates and chariot races. Cavalry displays and mock battles may also have been held.

*Panathenaic amphora depicting a quadriga, a four horse chariot race, approx. 400 BC

On day 8, further prize distribution and celebration occurred. Prizes such as crowns and amphorae of olive oil were distributed amongst the winners of various competitions. Winners were recognised and granted civic honours before dancing, feasting and public revelry ensued. The festival concluded in a symbolic showing of unification and Athenian honour.

*Attic black-figure neck-amphora depicting a komos, 560 BC

The City Dionysia:

The City Dionysia was a festival with origins dating back to the 6^th century BC which was held every year in honour of Dionysus, god of wine, fertility and theatre. The festival came about because of an alliance forged between Athens and Eleutherae. As a token of friendship and unity, the Eleutherae gifted the Athenians a statue of Dionysus. The Athenians declined to accept the gift because of a general feeling of disconnect and suspicion felt towards Dionysus by the people of Athens. A plague then ravaged the genitals of Athenian men, leaving them infertile and diseased. Fearing that their refusal of the statue resulted in the plague – a divine punishment sent by Dionysus – the Athenians reversed their decision, accepted the statue, and established the City Dionysia, a festival dedicated to Dionysus. With these actions, the plague ceased and the afflicted male population regained their fertility and were relieved of their sores.

*a historical reconstruction of the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens, 6th century BC

The City Dionysia was as a celebration of drama, civic pride and religious dedication. It was a significant platform for the first showings of dramatic and comedic works by playwrights such as Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes, Greek titans of drama. The festival took place during Elaphebolion (March-April) and had a duration of roughly 5 days. Its being held early on in Spring symbolised renovation and fecundity, a sense of continuation and promise.

*terracotta mask representing Dionysus

The vast majority of the City Dionysia was held at the Sanctuary of Dionysus, on the South side of the Acropolis. The sanctuary encompassed a sacred temple and altar as well as a sizeable theatre in which there stood an altar dedicated to Dionysus located in advance of the stage. The process of choosing the plays which were to be performed in the theatre was superintended by an elected official, the eponymous archon. This administrative figure was charged with selecting 8 playwrights (3 tragic, 5 comic) who authored a total of 17 plays, all of which were performed over the course of the festival. Another of the eponymous archon’s duties was to choose a choregos, a civic role adopted by a citizen wealthy enough to either finance the performances or pay for a trireme; the choice was his, but once selected he was obligated to perform this liturgy. Those who participated in the plays financed by the choregos included one hundred constituents of individual Attic tribes who took part in the dithyramb, as well as other professional and amateur actors who performed the works written by the playwrights and who comprised the chorus, a singing and dancing company.

*photograph of the Theatre of Dionysus in modern times

On Proagon day, a number of days before the official start of the festival, a ceremony was held where playwrights were initiated and provided with summaries of their works. Alongside the playwrights, choregoi and actors were introduced, which built up a sense of anticipation and fostered excitement before the festival began. During this preliminary stage, civic awards were presented and fallen citizens were honoured.

The night before the Dionysia began, a torchlight procession took place, an event which sought to reanimate and recall the day on which the statue of Dionysus was brought into the city.

*Attic terracotta black-figure column-krater depicting a symposium, a drinking party, attributed to Lydos, 550 BC

On day one of the festival the opulent pompe (the procession) made its way through Athens to the Temple of Dionysus. The Pompe comprised citizens, choregoi, dancers, metics and young girls carrying ritual baskets. In a nod to Dionysus’ connection to fertility and virility, phallic symbols were carried by members of the procession in his honour. Sacrifices of bulls and other animals would have also taken place during this time. Following this, dithyrambic competitions between members of Attic’s ten tribes took place; each tribe would enter a chorus of men and boys to compete in the Theatre of Dionysus. To conclude the festival’s opening day, a komos ensued, a rowdy, drunken revelry which involved heavy drinking, singing and dancing by men in public spaces.

*Attic black-figure krater depicting Dionysus and members of his thiasos, 525-500 BC

On the second day, the festival’s opening ceremony and opening rituals were performed. The opening ceremony included a piglet sacrifice carried out by the Priest of Dionysus and a libation to the gods poured by each of Athen’s ten generals. Other rituals included the parading of tribute payments between allied states and territories and the presentation of armour to sons of fallen soldiers’, courtesy of the state; both were events which showcased the state’s civic honour and political exhibition. Day two also saw the initial five comedies performed. A cost of two obols was required to attend performances of works composed by playwrights such as Aristophanes, cleverly designed to mock public figures, reflect on public life and most importantly, to entertain.

*Attic red-figure cup, attributed to the Epidromos painter, depicting the sacrifice of a pig, 510-500 BC

Day three marked the first of three days exclusive to the performance of tragic trilogies. An individual playwright set forth a trio of tragedies each conveying the complexities of human struggle and pain, or which raised philosophical questions of existence and endeavour. The performance of these plays was followed by a single satyr play from the same playwright, providing the audience with comic relief. Examples of these works include Aeschylus’ Oresteia and Sophocles’ Oedipus trilogy.

*a drinking cup depicting a maenad and a satyr, 490-480 BC

Both the fourth and fifth day followed the same format as day three; on each, a tragic playwright presented his trilogy and satyr play, which was likely based upon similar themes of religion, justice, fate and war. Subsequent to this, once all plays had been performed, post festival, the judging began. This process involved ten randomly selected judges, one from each of Attic’s tribes, taken from a pre-chosen group, individually ranking the plays and placing their selection in an urn. The eponymous archon would then choose five of the ten lists and calculate the most votes cast for any given play. The winner of the voting process was awarded a garland of ivy. In addition, the choregos of the victorious playwright was given the honour of funding the production of a monument featuring his, the actor’s, the musician’s and eponymous archon’s name inscribed on it, celebrating their collective triumph.

The altar in ancient Greek and Roman festivals

The altar’s role within ancient Greek and Roman festivals was a sacred and central one. Altars served as structures of profound symbolic significance, representing the fundamental connection between the human and the divine — what the Greeks understood as the boundary (horos) between mortal existence and the realm of the gods. This boundary was not merely symbolic but was treated as a living, operative threshold, one that required constant maintenance through correct ritual action.

Theophrastus, writing in the fourth century BC, defined piety (eusebeia) in part as “knowledge of how to serve the gods,” and sacrifice at the altar was the primary expression of that knowledge. Similarly, the Roman scholar Varro, as reported by Augustine in The City of God, divided theology into three kinds — mythical, physical, and civic — and it was civic religion, enacted publicly at altars, that he regarded as essential to the functioning of the state.

*Greek marble altar, late 2nd or early 1st century BC

Sacrifice, Libation, and Offering

In both Greek and Roman festivals, the altar was the place at which animal sacrifices, libations, and offerings to the gods took place. Sacrifice (thysia in Greek, sacrificium in Latin) was seen as the primary act which marked religious observance — the defining gesture that separated a festival from an ordinary gathering. As Walter Burkert observed in Homo Necans (1972), sacrifice was not incidental to Greek religion but constituted its very core: “The altar is where the sacred action is accomplished.”

*Altar of Mars and Venus, dedicated in 124 AD

Homer’s epics offer some of the earliest and most detailed descriptions of sacrificial practice. In the Iliad (I.447–474), when Chryses performs sacrifice to Apollo on behalf of the Greeks, the procedure is rendered with careful precision: barley was scattered, the animals’ throats were cut, they were flayed and jointed, the thigh bones were wrapped in fat and burnt upon the altar, and the participants ate the remaining flesh — a structure that reflects the tripartite division of the sacrificial animal between gods, priests, and community. The smoke and savour of the burnt portions rose to the heavens, conveying the offering to the divine recipient. In Hesiod’s Theogony (535–557), the mythological explanation for this division is given through the story of Prometheus’ deception of Zeus at Mecone, which established the precedent by which humans kept the meat and gave the bones and fat to the gods.

*marble bust depicting Homer

Libations (sponde in Greek, libatio in Latin) were equally indispensable. Wine, water, milk, honey, and oil were all poured at the altar’s base or onto its surface, depending on the deity and the occasion. Pausanias (Description of Greece, V.13.8–11) records that at Olympia the altar of Zeus was built up over centuries from the accumulated ashes of sacrificed thigh bones mixed with the water of the Alpheus river, forming a great mound to which the priests ascended by steps — a striking illustration of how the physical substance of repeated sacrifice was itself incorporated into the altar’s structure.

*terracotta pelike depicting a libation at the departure of a young warrior, attributed to the Altamura Painter, 470 BC

Communication with the Divine

Altars were sites where divine beings might be communicated with, and offerings were given as part of a reciprocal practice (do ut des — “I give so that you may give”) that ensured the gods received their due and that spiritual harmony was preserved between the human and the divine. This concept of reciprocity was not merely transactional; it was understood as the proper ordering of the cosmos, a reflection of the hierarchical relationship between mortals and immortals.

Pindar (Olympian Ode I) articulates this relationship clearly, presenting the gods as beings who bestow excellence upon mortals in return for appropriate honour. The Homeric Hymns repeatedly emphasise that gods are pleased by sacrificial smoke and the “sweet savour” of burnt offerings — the Greek word knise, the fat-smoke of sacrifice, is presented throughout archaic poetry as the medium through which mortal devotion reaches the divine. The constant passage of blood, smoke, and flesh to the heavens conveyed both the physical reality of the gift and the emotional fervour of the worshippers’ intent.

*marble relief depicting Marcus Aurelius and members of the Imperial family offering sacrifice

In Roman practice, the concept of the pax deorum — the peace of the gods, the condition of divine goodwill toward Rome — was understood to depend directly on the correct performance of ritual at altars. Livy, in his History of Rome, records numerous instances in which Rome suffered military or civic catastrophe because religious rites had been improperly conducted or omitted; conversely, the conscientious performance of sacrifice and the renewal of vows at public altars was seen as the mechanism by which the pax deorum was secured and maintained. Cicero, in De Natura Deorum (II.8–9), states that Rome’s greatness derived not from military valour alone but from its superior piety (pietas) — its scrupulous care in honouring the gods at the proper times and in the proper forms.

Processions, Communal Rites, and Civic Identity

Many ancient festivals centred their processions and public rites around altars, usually situated outdoors, where large groups of people would gather to participate in events of both civic unification and religious worship. The Greek term for such a procession was pompe — literally “a sending forth” — and the procession to the altar was itself a sacred act, not merely a preliminary to sacrifice.

*Attic terracotta oinochoe depicting Pompe, the personification of a religious procession, between Eros (left) and Dionysus (right), mid 4th century BC

The Great Panathenaia at Athens, held every four years in honour of Athena, offers one of the most fully documented examples. The festival culminated in a grand procession up the Acropolis toward the altar of Athena on the Parthenon’s east side, during which the goddess’s new robe (peplos) was carried on a ship-like vehicle through the streets of Athens. The entire citizen body, along with resident aliens (metics) and allies, participated in various capacities, and the spectacle — depicted in the Parthenon frieze — was as much a demonstration of Athenian imperial power as it was an act of religious devotion.

*Attic black-figure amphora depicting a bull being led to an altar, attributed to the Berlin Painter, 550-540 BC

Similarly, at the sanctuary of Zeus at Olympia, the great altar described by Pausanias was the focal point not only of sacrifice during the Olympic Games but of a broader programme of civic and inter-state religion. Ambassadors (theoroi) from across the Greek world attended the Games, and the sacrifices performed at the altar were understood as acts of pan-Hellenic communion, temporarily transcending the boundaries of individual city-states. Thucydides (III.104) records that the festival at Delos served a comparable function for the Ionians.

*reconstruction of the Great Ash Altar of Zeus at Olympia

In Rome, the Ara Maxima — the Great Altar of Hercules in the Forum Boarium — was one of the oldest and most venerable religious sites in the city, associated with the myth of Hercules’ defeat of the monster Cacus and treated as a site of Hercules’ own foundation. Livy (History of Rome, I.7) records its antiquity and the rituals performed there. The Ara Pacis Augustae, dedicated in 9 BC, is perhaps the most politically charged altar in the Roman world: its sculpted friezes depict the imperial family and Roman priests processing solemnly to sacrifice, presenting Augustus and his dynasty as the guardians of the pax deorum and the embodiment of Roman piety. The altar was not merely a religious object but a statement of ideological programme, making visible the claim that Rome’s peace, prosperity, and divinely sanctioned order were inseparable from the figure of Augustus.

*detail of a scale model of Imperial Rome by Italo Gismondi depicting the Forum Boarum and Temple of Hercules Victor (visible at the bottom of the image)

These communal gatherings at altars reaffirmed collective identity and were occasions on which loyalty was publicly demonstrated toward the gods, the city, and its leadership. In Athens, participation in the civic sacrifices was linked to citizenship; in Rome, the performance of sacrifice by the magistrates on behalf of the Roman people expressed the organic unity of res publica and religio.

*Ara Pacis Augustae

Ritual Purity and the Altar’s Sanctity

Access to the altar was governed by strict rules of ritual purity (katharsis in Greek, purificatio in Latin). Those who were polluted — by recent contact with death, by bloodguilt, by certain sexual or physical conditions — were required to undergo purification before approaching. Thucydides (III.104) records that the Athenians purified the island of Delos, removing graves from its soil, precisely because the island’s sanctity as the birthplace of Apollo required that no pollution should taint its ground.

*Antigone Pouring a Libation Over the Corpse of her Brother Polynices by William Henry Reinhart, 1870 AD

The altar’s physical elevation — altars were typically raised structures, often approached by steps — reflected its liminal status as a threshold between the terrestrial and the divine. In Roman practice, those offering sacrifice would turn their faces upward to the heavens and pour libations onto the altar’s surface (focus), while in chthonic rites — sacrifices to the gods of the underworld — altars (bothroi, pit-altars, or low trenches) were used instead of raised structures, and the blood was allowed to flow into the earth rather than rise as smoke, reflecting the downward rather than upward orientation of the offering.

*Roman floor mosaic depicting the sacrifice of Iphigenia, 1st century BC

The altar’s place within Greek and Roman festivals was thus not that of a mere piece of cultic furniture but of the indispensable centre around which religious, political, and communal life cohered. It was requisite for the programmes of festivals, for the maintenance of ritual purity, and for the expression of community identity. As Fustel de Coulanges observed in The Ancient City (1864), ancient religion was not a private affair of the conscience but a public, embodied, and communal practice inseparable from the life of the city itself — and it was at the altar that this truth was most fully and most visibly enacted.

Why people attended ancient Greek and Roman festivals

Ancient Greek and Roman festivals were deeply spiritual events, rooted in a theology of reciprocity between mortals and the divine. People who participated in honouring the gods felt a vehement sense of moral purpose and divine favour, and a feeling of being sheltered from the hard forces of life — disease, war, failed harvests, and death — by the gods they worshipped. This relationship was governed by the principle of do ut des (‘I give so that you may give’), a compact between the human and divine orders in which correct ritual observance was expected to secure divine goodwill. Religious rituals such as sacrifices and processions gave people an opportunity to seek divine connection and secure the blessings of the gods; the great Panathenaic procession, for instance, culminated in the presentation of a newly woven peplos to Athena, an act of devotion that renewed the covenant between the goddess and her city. Pindar, whose victory odes were themselves composed for performance at festival sites, captures this spirit when he writes of the gods as presiding over human striving: the games at Olympia, Nemea, the Isthmus, and Delphi were not secular diversions but acts of worship, held in sacred precincts, framed by hymns and sacrificial smoke. As Thucydides notes in recounting Pericles’ Funeral Oration, Athenians regarded their festivals as central to the city’s identity and as one of the chief comforts and glories of civic life (Thucydides 2.38).

*statue of Thucydides by Theophilus Hansen

In addition to this sacred dimension, festivals featured events which provided tremendous entertainment and awe-inspiring spectacles to their attendants. Athletic competitions, music, drama, chariot races and gladiatorial games were all on show at festivals in ancient Greece and Rome. In Greece, festivals such as the City Dionysia featured performances of Greek tragedies and comedies, and their dramatic competitions were among the most keenly anticipated events in the Athenian calendar. The plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes were first performed not in a theatre in any modern sense but as acts of devotion to Dionysus, with the priest of the god occupying an honorary seat of stone in the front row of the Theatre of Dionysus. Aristophanes himself, in the Acharnians, has his character Dicaeopolis remark that Dionysus deserves the city’s finest offerings — a comic acknowledgement of the festival’s divine frame. The competitive element was fierce: playwrights, choruses, and choregoi (wealthy citizens who funded the productions) competed for prestigious prizes, and the names of victors were inscribed on public records. In Rome, people enjoyed the mock naval battles (naumachiae) and gladiator contests of the Ludi Romani, events which were free to the public and delivered high-quality entertainment on a fairly regular basis. Livy records that the Ludi Romani were among the most ancient of Roman institutions, traditionally associated with Jupiter Optimus Maximus, and that their programme expanded over the centuries as Rome’s wealth and imperial ambitions grew (Livy 1.35). Juvenal’s famous line about the Roman populace craving only panem et circenses — bread and circuses (Satires 10.81) — captures, albeit satirically, the centrality of public spectacle to Roman political and social life.

*Roman fresco from Pompeii depicting a multigenerational family banquet, 1st century AD

Everyone participated in festivals: they were communal events that could be attended by citizens regardless of status or rank. This breadth of participation stimulated and fostered the establishment of new relationships between people. Festivals served as scaffolding upon which the establishment of new families and friendships might be constructed. Civic identity was celebrated and shared values reinforced, which fostered a sense of community spirit and common belonging. Plutarch, in his Life of Solon, notes that festivals functioned as occasions for reconciling factional tensions and renewing bonds of civic solidarity. In Rome, Ovid’s Fasti — a poetic calendar of the Roman religious year — treats each festival as an occasion not only for divine propitiation but for the re-cementing of social ties: neighbours came together, old enmities were set aside, and the rhythms of communal life were restored. For the Greeks, the great Panhellenic festivals — Olympia, Pythia, Nemea, Isthmia — were remarkable in drawing together citizens from rival and even warring city-states under a sacred truce, the ekecheiria, reminding participants of their shared Hellenic identity even amid political fracture.

*black-figure vase painting depicting Greek athletes preparing for the pentathlon

Additionally, public feasts were held at festivals where meat from sacrificed animals was cooked and distributed amongst those attending, including the poorer classes for whom the consumption of nutritious food such as meat was not a regular feature of their diets. The Greek practice of thusia (blood sacrifice) was inseparable from communal feasting: once the gods had received their portion — the thigh bones wrapped in fat, the smoke rising to Olympus — the remaining meat was distributed and consumed by the participants. This meant that, in practice, the principal occasion on which most ordinary Greeks ate meat was during a festival sacrifice. The sociological implications were considerable. Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, identifies feasting together as one of the foundations of civic friendship (philia), and the shared meal at a festival would have made this abstract principle concretely felt (1160a). Things such as relaxation and free, nutritious food were necessary for people living in societies whose lives were often very labour-intensive and whose daily existence was a struggle. Hesiod’s Works and Days, composed for an audience of small farmers grinding through the agricultural seasons, presents the festivals of the gods as interruptions of toil that are not merely permitted but divinely ordained. Festivals took place during public holidays, periods during which business and legal activities were suspended — Athenian courts did not sit on festival days — offering citizens a genuine respite from work and all of the other pressures that people living in the ancient world had to contend with.

*Attic red-figure stamens depicting a sacrifice, 450-430 BC

For those looking to rise in prominence, especially young men, festivals provided an opportunity to gain prestige and honour through competitions and performances. Talented young athletes, artists, orators and poets exhibited their ability in the hope of acquiring fame or even patronage. The Greek concept of aretē — excellence or virtue made manifest in competitive achievement — found its highest public expression at festival games. Pindar’s Epinician Odes (Olympians, Pythians, Nemeans, Isthmians) were composed precisely to commemorate such victories and to broadcast the glory won by successful athletes and their home cities across the Greek world. For a young man from a noble family, an Olympic victory was the summit of social aspiration: Alcibiades, as Thucydides records, entered seven chariots at the Olympic Games of 416 BC and came first, second, and fourth, using the occasion to project Athenian power and his own political ambitions simultaneously (Thucydides 6.16). In Rome, young men of the aristocratic class would use festival performances and public speech-making as early rehearsals for the political career (cursus honorum) that awaited them; Cicero’s earliest public appearances as an orator were shaped by an awareness that such occasions were watched by men whose patronage could determine a career.

*The Orator, a bronze statue depicting the Etruscan magistrate Aule Metele, 1st century BC

Festivals played a key role in preserving and perpetuating history, myth and stories through the retelling of those of cultural and artistic significance. Customs and rituals passed down over generations were preserved by fresh engagement and participation, which took place at festivals, mitigating the risk of ancient tradition fading away whilst fortifying feelings of cultural identity. The rhapsodic recitations of Homer at the Panathenaic festival ensured that the Iliad and Odyssey were not merely preserved as texts but continuously re-performed before living audiences, re-embedding the heroic past into the present consciousness of the Athenian demos. Herodotus opens his Histories with the observation that the deeds of Greeks and barbarians must not lose their glory through time (Histories 1, Proem); the festival context was one of the principal mechanisms by which such deeds were kept alive. In Rome, the ludi scaenici — theatrical performances at festivals — served an analogous function: plays re-enacted myths and historical episodes, and the religious dramas associated with festivals like the Ludi Saeculares (the Secular Games, held only once per generation) were explicitly intended to anchor the community in the deep time of Roman tradition. Augustus revived the Ludi Saeculares in 17 BC, commissioning Horace to compose the Carmen Saeculare for the occasion — a hymn that wove together Trojan origins, Julian dynasty mythology, and divine favour into a single, festival-bound act of cultural renewal.

*Roman mosaic depicting masks for the performance of tragedies and comedies resting on a socle next to two flutes, 2nd century AD

The people who attended ancient Greek and Roman festivals enjoyed and cherished them because they combined celebration (both religious and cultural), entertainment, and social endeavour into a single package which provided opportunities for emotional and spiritual pride and nourishment, and symbolised the unification of a city’s population under shared myths, gods, and traditions. In this sense the festival was not an interruption of ordinary life but its periodic consummation — the moment when the diffuse energies of civic existence were concentrated and given form. Thucydides’ Pericles, again, puts it best: the Athenians had provided for the spirit the most numerous recreations from toil, both in the contests and sacrifices they celebrated throughout the year, and in the elegance of their private establishments (Thucydides 2.38). That this claim was made in a funeral oration — spoken over the bodies of the war dead — reminds us how deeply festivals were understood to be expressions not merely of pleasure but of what it meant to belong to a civilised community and to live, however briefly and precariously, in the favour of the gods.

*from the Altar of Domitius Ahenobarbus depicting the Census frieze, late 2nd century BC

The Centauromachy and the Amazonomachy

The Centauromachy and the Amazonomachy were both mythical battles in ancient Greek mythology which represent the struggle between ruthless barbarism and progressive civilisation. They were not merely entertaining adventure stories but ideologically charged narratives, repeatedly invoked by Greek artists, poets, and statesmen to articulate what it meant to be Greek — rational, ordered, governed by nomos (law and custom) — against those forces, whether monstrous, foreign, or feminine, which threatened to undo that order. Both myths enjoyed a long and rich life in Greek visual and literary culture, and their frequent juxtaposition in the decorative programmes of major temples and public buildings suggests that the Greeks themselves understood them as parallel expressions of a single, defining cultural preoccupation.

The Centauromachy

The Centauromachy was a battle fought between the Centaurs and the Lapiths, a Thessalian people of heroic lineage. It came about as a result of the Centaurs being invited to the wedding feast of the Lapith King Pirithous and his bride Hippodamia. The Centaurs were, in myth, the half-brothers of the Lapiths — both descended from Ixion, King of the Lapiths — and their invitation to the ceremony was thus an act of kinship, however uneasy. Originally, they came as friends of the king, but toward the end of the ceremony, having encountered wine for the first time (some accounts specify that they were unaccustomed to it entirely), they became feverishly drunk, which prompted them to attempt the abduction of the female attendees, amongst them the bride herself. Diodorus Siculus records the incident in his Bibliotheca Historica, emphasising the Centaurs’ inability to govern their appetites as the essential cause of the catastrophe: what began as a feast of kinship and celebration collapsed into violence precisely because the Centaurs lacked the self-discipline that civilised society demands (Diodorus Siculus 4.70). Ovid gives the scene its most extended literary treatment in the Metamorphoses (12.210–535), where the Centaur Eurytus (Eurytion in other sources) seizes Hippodamia by the hair at the very moment the torches are lit and the wedding songs begin — a brilliantly compressed image of civilisation’s fragility, violated at the instant of its most joyful self-expression.

*a marble metope from the Parthenon, 445-440 BC

A notable guest at the ceremony who took part in the clash was none other than the mighty Greek hero Theseus, great friend of Pirithous and king of Athens. His efforts to rescue Hippodamia from the Centaur Eurytion were altogether successful and marked the first of many combats Theseus had with Centaurs during the battle. Ovid’s narrator in the Metamorphoses dwells on Theseus with evident admiration, describing him cutting a path through the mêlée with a combination of physical power and strategic clarity — precisely the qualities that the Centaurs, in their drunken frenzy, conspicuously lack. It is fair to say that without the intervention of Theseus, the Lapiths might not have emerged victorious. Plutarch, in his Life of Theseus, presents the hero’s participation as entirely consistent with his broader character: a man defined by his commitment to justice, the protection of the weak, and the defeat of the monstrous — the slayer of the Minotaur here performs an analogous function, restoring order where bestial appetite has run amok (Plutarch, Life of Theseus 30).

*Theseus Saving Hippodamia by Johannes Pfuhl, 1906

Nevertheless, it was an affair which would later stand to symbolise something far larger than a dispute at a wedding banquet: namely, the eternal struggle between the Centaurs, who represent all forms of ferocious, untamed nature — appetite without reason, strength without restraint — and the Lapiths, who represent the Greek ideals of rational conduct, social obligation, and soundness of mind and spirit. The Centaur in Greek thought occupied a deeply ambivalent position. Figures such as Chiron — tutor to Achilles, Asclepius, and Jason — represented the possibility of a Centaur who had achieved wisdom and self-governance; but the Centaurs of the Centauromachy are Chiron’s antithesis, embodiments of the chaos that lies beneath civilisation’s surface and which erupts when the restraints of nomos are removed. Pindar, in the Second Pythian Ode, uses Ixion’s transgressions — the lineage from which both Lapiths and Centaurs spring — as a paradigm of the man who cannot control his desires and who therefore falls from divine favour: the myth’s roots were deeply embedded in Greek moral theology.

*Roman mosaic depicting the Centauromachy, 3rd century AD

The battle is depicted on some of the most significant architectural sculpture of the ancient world. The most celebrated representation is the south metopes of the Parthenon in Athens (c. 447–432 BC), a series of carved marble panels running along the exterior of the temple of Athena, each depicting a single combat between a Lapith and a Centaur. The metopes are remarkable both for their sculptural energy and for their ideological clarity: again and again, the human figure is shown straining upward or fighting back, whilst the Centaur lurches, rears, or falls — the composition itself enacting the triumph of human order over bestial disorder. Pausanias, visiting Athens in the second century AD, notes the Parthenon’s sculptural programme with evident admiration, identifying the battle scenes as among the building’s chief glories (Pausanias 1.17.2). Equally significant is the depiction of the Centauromachy on the west pediment of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia (c. 470–456 BC), where Apollo, the god of reason, order, and divine law, stands at the centre of the composition with arm outstretched, presiding over — and in some readings actively directing — the Lapiths’ victory. His presence transforms the myth from a local Thessalian legend into a statement of Panhellenic values: the god who governs sophia (wisdom) and sophrosyne (temperance) endorses the defeat of those who possess neither.

*marble sculptures from the West Pediment of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, 470-456 BC

The Amazonomachy

The Amazonomachy was a battle fought between the Amazons — a prominent tribe of female warriors, traditionally located by Greek sources on the eastern margins of the known world, in Pontus or Scythia — and the Greeks. In Greek imagination, the Amazons were a society that had deliberately inverted the Greek social order: they were ruled by women, they practised warfare as their primary occupation, and they excluded men from positions of authority. As such, they functioned as a kind of mirror-image of Greece, both fascinating and threatening, embodying everything that Greek patriarchal and civic culture defined itself against.

*a marble slab from the Amazon Frieze of the Mausoleum at Halikarnassos, 350 BC

The most ancient strand of the myth comes about during Heracles’ ninth labour, in which King Eurystheus sent Heracles to obtain the belt (zōstēr or ζωστήρ) of Hippolyte, Queen of the Amazons. The belt was a gift from Ares, the god of war, and was a mark of Hippolyte’s royal authority and martial pre-eminence — not merely a decorative object but an emblem of sovereignty. Apollodorus, in the Bibliotheca, gives a compact account of the labour: when Heracles arrived at the Amazons’ city, Hippolyte, impressed by his fame and strength, offered to grant him the belt willingly (Apollodorus 2.5.9). This detail is significant — it suggests that the conflict which followed was not inevitable but the product of divine interference. Before Heracles was able to receive word of Hippolyte’s consent, the goddess Hera, who despised Heracles beyond measure and had persecuted him throughout his life, spread a rumour amongst the Amazon warriors that Heracles was planning to abduct their queen. The Amazons therefore armed themselves and attacked Heracles and his men; in the ensuing battle, Heracles, suspecting treachery on Hippolyte’s part, killed her and took the belt by force. Diodorus Siculus gives a more expansive account in which Heracles’ victory over the Amazons is presented as one of his most glorious achievements, bringing the wild and ungovernable female warriors of the East into subjection through Greek heroic aretē (Diodorus Siculus 4.16).

*marble sculpture part of Michaelertrakt of the Imperial complex in Vienna, 1889-1893

A second, equally prominent version of the Amazonomachy involves Theseus and centres on the abduction of Antiope, an Amazon queen. The accounts vary in their details — Plutarch notes the divergence of his sources with some frustration, remarking that the traditions surrounding Theseus’ encounter with the Amazons are particularly difficult to disentangle (Plutarch, Life of Theseus 26–27). In some tellings, Theseus accompanied Heracles on his expedition and took Antiope as a prize of war; in others, and Plutarch appears to favour a version of this, Antiope herself was drawn to Theseus and came to Athens willingly, out of love or admiration. Either way, the Amazons interpreted the queen’s departure as an intolerable affront to their community and their honour, and they invaded Attica in force to recover her. Plutarch records that the Amazons crossed the Cimmerian Bosporus, passed through Thrace, and descended into Greece — a remarkable military expedition that ancient writers apparently took seriously as a piece of quasi-historical tradition. Having penetrated into Attica, they made camp in the heart of Athens itself, near the Areopagus — the ancient hill of judgement and, later, Athens’ most august legal court — and a ferocious battle ensued. Theseus and the Athenians ultimately prevailed, driving the Amazons back; in all versions of the story, Antiope died in the course of the fighting, whether cut down by her own former companions who regarded her as a traitor, or caught in the general carnage of battle.

*Theseus and Antiope, a marble sculpture which originally adorned the pediment of the Temple of Apollo in Eretria, 510 BC

Pausanias, whose Description of Greece is one of the most invaluable surviving guides to the topography of myth in the ancient world, notes that the Athenians preserved tombs and grave-markers associated with the Amazons’ invasion, lending the myth a quasi-archaeological grounding in the physical landscape of the city (Pausanias 1.2.1). The Amazonomachy was as prominent in Athenian visual culture as the Centauromachy. It appeared on the shield of the chryselephantine statue of Athena Parthenos inside the Parthenon, crafted by Phidias — a colossal and breathtakingly detailed work in which Athena herself bore the image of the Amazon battle on the arm she raised in defence of her city. It featured also on the north metopes of the Parthenon (largely destroyed), and on the paintings of the Stoa Poikile (Painted Stoa) in the Athenian Agora, where the Amazonomachy was depicted alongside the Battle of Marathon — a juxtaposition of mythical and historical victories over eastern invaders that was surely deliberate and politically charged, conflating the Persian Wars with the legendary Amazon invasion in the Athenian civic imagination.

*marble relief, part of a Roman sarcophagus depicting the Battle of Marathon or another Greek-Persian conflict, 2nd or 3rd century BC

Both the Centauromachy and the Amazonomachy, then, functioned as mythological templates through which the Greeks organised their understanding of self and other, civilisation and its enemies. The Centaurs violated the sacred bonds of xenia (guest-friendship) and the institution of marriage; the Amazons violated the natural hierarchy of gender as the Greeks conceived it. Both were defeated by Greek heroes — Theseus appearing in both myths as the champion of Athenian order — and their defeat was understood not as mere military victory but as the reassertion of the cosmic and social principles upon which Greek civilisation rested. That these myths were carved into the most sacred temples of the ancient world, rendered permanent in marble and ivory and gold, suggests just how fundamental they were to the Greek sense of identity: not peripheral legends but cornerstone narratives, insisting at every turn that what made Greece Greece was its capacity to subdue, through reason and heroic will, everything that threatened to overwhelm it.

On whether the Greeks or the Romans expressed their power better in their architecture

The Greek and Roman civilisations were both, in their prime, amongst the most prominent and powerful societies the world has ever seen, pioneers in technological advancement, cultural and religious expression, artistic progression, and architecture. Both the Greeks and later the Romans were responsible for some of the finest and most magnificent structures ever constructed. These structures served a variety of different functions and were created to fulfil a wide range of ideological purposes, usually expressions of religious devotion, artistic and architectural endeavour and most importantly, as a way of expressing the power each had achieved; they were usually symbols of domination, progression and might. Designs and constructions which were built to achieve these goals are amongst those with the most staying power, survivors amidst the demise of their makers, and they are buildings whose magnificence we marvel at to this day. It is important to remember that without Greek architecture and engineering, many of the most spectacular examples of Roman architecture and engineering would simply not exist. Such was the influence ancient Greece had on Rome during its inception until its eventual collapse. Therefore, it is crucial when examining and contrasting examples from Greece and Rome to bear this fact in mind; that because so much of Rome and Roman architectural ideals and thought was derived from the Greeks, their creations should not be considered altogether separate.

*a column from the Ionic order of Classical architecture, from the Erechtheion temple, 421-405 BC

The Parthenon:

When one thinks of ancient Greek architectural examples it is the surely the one that springs most readily to mind. Built atop the Acropolis in the centre of Athens during the height of the Athenian Golden Age in mid-fifth century BCE under Perikles’ rule, the Parthenon is a temple dedicated to Athena Parthenos, Athens’ patron god and divine protector. Having been designed and engineered by Iktinos and Kallikrates with sculptural direction by Phidias (responsible for the massive internal cult statue of Athena), the Parthenon was primarily doric in style with a number of ionic elements and was constructed mostly from Pentelic marble hauled from the Mount Pentelicus quarries near Athens. The Parthenon features eight columns on each of its shorter ends (east and west) with seventeen along each of its longer sides (north and south). Examples of the designers’ attention to detail in attempts to achieve visual perfection: the Parthenon’s stylobate has a slight upward curvature and columns which are subtly swelled; a bulging which results in a convex curvature of their shafts. The interior of the Parthenon is divided into two main sections: the cella, which housed the magnificent cult statue of Athena, and the opisthodomos, a room at the rear of the temple which served as the Athenian Empire’s treasury. The Parthenon’s exterior decoration consists of metopes which depict mythical battles such as the Amazonomachy and Centauromachy, both symbolic of Greek triumph in battle. The Panathenaic procession is depicted on the continuous ionic frieze, an event which represents civic-religious unity and collaboration. Large triangular structures known as pediments on the eastern and western side of the Parthenon depicted Athena’s birth and the contest between Athena and Poseidon over the patronage of Athens, both events central to Athenians’ cultural identity.

*The Parthenon atop the Acropolis in Athens, 447-432 BC

The Parthenon was constructed during a period of tumult within Athens. Following the sack by the Persians in 480BC, the Acropolis had been brought to ruin and many of its temples destroyed, burnt to the ground. However, by the mid fifth century, Athens, following the establishment of the Delian League, had risen to prominence amongst Greek city-states and emerged as a powerful leader in control of the alliance. After the Persian wars, in 447BC, Perikles, an Athenian general and statesman, initiated a building program to rebuild Athens using tribute money collected from city-state members of the Delian League. The money was transferred from the League’s treasury on the island of Delos to the Parthenon where it was stored in the treasury; the funds used to glorify Athens, marking the beginning of a period during which the Athenian state was at its cultural and political zenith. As such, the Parthenon was constructed at a time when Athens was looking to rise in power, wealth and prominence following the end of the Persian wars. Its construction marked the beginning of an era during which Athens was a city at the height of its power and at the forefront of art, philosophy and architecture in the Greek world. This is reflected in many of the temple’s architectural and design features, from the depiction of Greek victory in conflict on the metopes to the celebration of civic-religious unity on the frieze, the Parthenon’s attempts to radiate power was palpable.

The Pantheon:

The Pantheon was originally constructed in the Campus Martius area of the city of Rome in 27 BC by commission of Marcus Agrippa under Augustus’ rule. It was later rebuilt by Emperor Hadrian around 120 AD. The building bears Agrippa’s name on its face with an inscription which reads: ‘M AGRIPPA L F COS TERTIVM FECIT’ (‘Marcus Agrippa, son of Lucius, consul for the third time, built this’). The Pantheon was a temple designed by the architect Apollodorus of Damascus with contributed design from Hadrian. Its front (portico) was clearly constructed with heavy Greek influence, and the rotunda and dome are a perfect example of the innovations the Romans made in engineering at the time. The Pantheon was built using a mixture of materials including granite, marble, brick-faced concrete and Roman concrete. The portico was of classical Greek design; featuring sixteen Corinthian columns, the rotunda was a very large circular interior space. The concrete dome which sits atop the rotunda was revelatory in its design and construction and massive in size and complexity. It remains to this day the largest unreinforced concrete dome ever created. It is 142 feet in diameter and the same in height, forming a sphere of perfect proportion when viewed from within. At its pinnacle is a nine-metre-wide circular opening known as an oculus which allows for the only source of natural light to enter the building. The Pantheon’s ceiling is coffered, light, functional and ornamental. The floor is of slightly convex design to allow water coming in through the oculus to drain.

*The Pantheon in Rome, commissioned 27 BC, completed 126-128 AD

The Pantheon was constructed during a time when the Roman empire held the most territory in its history, a time of relative tranquillity and affluence for those in Rome. Hadrian, the emperor at the time, was renowned for his passion for architecture, and he was a patron whose structures were profoundly influenced by Greek architectural ideals. Because the Pantheon buildings had burned down, Hadrian viewed the project not simply just as a restoration but as root-and-branch innovation, particularly given the complex and radical nature of the use of concrete and engineering in the project. The Pantheon, unlike the Parthenon, was created to honour all Roman gods, not a single one, as suggested by its name; “Pantheon”, derived from the Greek pan (all) and theos (gods). As a structure erected under imperial rule, the Pantheon was a space dedicated to the unification of all gods under the imperial banner. The use of diverse materials and the complex mathematics which contributed to the build were designed to strike awe and astound all those who saw it, and make people view it not only as a building but as a symbol of technological prowess, philosophical advancement and political and state power. As such, the Pantheon was a demonstration by the state that the power Rome had come to wield was as a result of and was continually reliant upon divine consent and a reciprocal relationship with the gods. This implies that Agrippa, Augustus, and later Hadrian were leaders who wished to construct monuments which connected them to the gods and portray themselves as leaders, who, in the eyes of the people, were intent on preserving religious order. And of course, as men who had the initiative and power to enact the design and build of some of the most revolutionary structures in the history of the world. This, in itself, is a demonstration of personal imperial power through architecture.

Therefore, the Parthenon was a building which was constructed as an expression of civic, cultural and religious power and prominence. It was designed with elegance and in proportions which were refined and visually consonant, a symbol of perfection in traditional Greek form. It was built to draw attention to Athens’ victory over Persia, Athenian democracy’s solidity and, of course, Athena, the goddess to whom it was dedicated. It was perceived at the time a building of unparalleled artistry and structural balance, the epitome of classical beauty. Its resonance as a piece of propaganda was manifest in its reference to civic and cultural power and prestige. The Pantheon was a building constructed to express a notion of imperial power contingent upon a good relationship with the gods. It featured a dome (the world’s largest at the time) constructed after the original temple’s construction which was monumental and awe-inspiring in size and a truly magnificent example of Roman architectural innovation. At the time, it was perceived to be the product of unparalleled technological genius and it has subsequently served as the blueprint for self-supporting domes ever since. As a piece of propaganda, it was a daring declaration of Roman domination and superiority as a city leading the world. However, when considering which, the Parthenon or the Pantheon, is a better expression of power, it is important to remember that perhaps the most striking and impressive aspect of the latter is the dome, a feature added to the original structure more than a century after its original construction. In terms of architectural potency, the Parthenon made a vehement political statement instantly, in its original form, at a time when Athens was bidding to be a dominant superpower. It is the fact that the Parthenon was a building that was so perfectly tuned to its time and place and the dynamic nature of the assertion it made which gives it the edge over the Pantheon.

The Temple of Zeus at Olympia:

However, when one compares the impact of The Temple of Zeus at Olympia and the Colosseum in Rome, a different conclusion can be reached. The Temple of Zeus was built to worship Zeus at Olympia, the city in which the Olympic games were held. The temple was of classical Greek design; rectangular, and made primarily of limestone with marble details. It housed a gold and ivory chryselephantine statue of Zeus in its cella. It featured splendid decorative elements, sharing the same architectural features as those of the Parthenon (metopes, pediment, stylobate etc.). The art on the temple depicts the twelve labours of Herakles, a symbol of Greek power and might. It served as the main place of worship for the most prestigious and supreme god of all and emphasised notions of Panhellenic identity. As a piece of architecture, its extremely large scale as well as its symmetry demonstrated Greek technological power and prominence and its imagery represented ideals of heroism and Greek virtue.

*illustration of the Temple of Zeus as it might have looked in the 5th century BC by Wilhelm Lübke

The Colosseum:

The Colosseum was constructed as a venue intended for the staging of public entertainment, gladiatorial contests and other brutal events. A circular amphitheatre made of primarily concrete as well as limestone and volcanic rock, it seated an estimated fifty thousand to eighty thousand people. Its interior consisted of multi-tiered seating and an intricate network of underground tunnels beneath the arena floor. The Colosseum featured minimal sculptural decoration as its design was predominantly functional and with structural integrity in mind. Nevertheless, it was an extremely complex engineering project, due to both its magnitude and the unprecedented and novel nature of its design and construction techniques. Its function was as a piece of propaganda intended to popularise imperial rule and use entertainment to appease Rome’s masses. It conveyed a powerful message related to the city’s command over mortality; what and who should and should not be destroyed was at the discretion of the emperor, a figure who was in charge of the fate of all those competing in the arena. Therefore, as a structure it had no religious significance to speak of and was altogether different in its conception from temples and other religious sites. Nevertheless, as a monument showcasing imperial wealth and supremacy it was peerless. The Colosseum’s symbolic significance cannot be understated, and it remains to this day a prime example of both the power and skill Rome had come to wield, an iconic expression of total dominance over land and people.

*The Colosseum in Rome, completed in 80 AD

For the reasons discussed above, whilst the Greeks have the edge in terms of architectural forms which the Romans derived inspiration from, what came later in Roman times (most obviously demonstrated by the Colosseum) remains unparalleled. So, for this reason, in answer to the question of which civilisation expressed their power better in their architecture, the answer must be the Romans. However, it must be said that a direct comparison which does not favour the Greeks is unfair due to the fact that what the Romans constructed would not have been possible without the Greeks.

The Myth of Persephone and Demeter

On why the stories of Persephone and Eurydice appealed to the Greeks and Romans, who depicted them on funerary art and in poetry.

The stories of Persephone and Eurydice are among the most powerfully emotional narratives to have survived from the ancient world. They are stories which place love at the very centre of the cosmos — not as a private feeling between two individuals, but as a force of such magnitude that it bends the will of gods, disrupts the order of nature, and even penetrates the sealed and lightless kingdom of the dead. This notion would have appealed profoundly to the people of Greece and Rome, both reinforcing a sense of intimate connection with the divine and reassuring them that love which is strong enough is, in some essential sense, undying. The two myths share a common architecture: a beloved figure is lost to the Underworld, a grieving figure above fights to recover them, and the gods of the lower world — ordinarily implacable — are moved to a degree of mercy or concession that overturns the ordinary finality of death. That architecture is not accidental. It encodes a theology of love, one that the ancient world returned to again and again in its poetry, its philosophy, and the decoration of its tombs.

*Sarcophagus with the Abduction of Persephone by Hades, 200-225 AD

The story of Persephone’s abduction and descent is among the oldest in the Greek tradition. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter — composed perhaps in the seventh or sixth century BC, and one of the most sustained and emotionally complex of the early Greek hymns — is the foundational literary text. It opens with Persephone gathering flowers in a meadow, and the earth opening to swallow her as Hades, with Zeus’s sanction, carries her below. What follows is not primarily Persephone’s story in the Hymn but Demeter’s: a mother’s grief rendered on a cosmic scale. Demeter, goddess of grain and the earth’s fertility, withdraws her gifts from the world in her anguish, and the earth becomes barren. Humans starve; the gods receive no sacrificial offerings. The Hymn is explicit that it is love — maternal love, philia of the most primal kind — which holds the world to ransom: “she made that year most terrible and cruel for mortals upon the nourishing earth, nor did the earth send up the seed, for Demeter of the lovely garland hid it” (Homeric Hymn to Demeter, 305–308). The gods, deprived of honour and sacrifice, begin to panic. Zeus, whose sanction had enabled the abduction in the first place, is forced to reckon with the fact that divine power — even his own supreme authority — cannot compel Demeter’s heart. Her love for her daughter is simply not subject to his governance. He realises that the situation is untenable, that her wishes must be acknowledged and acted upon, and dispatches Hermes to negotiate Persephone’s return. Even Hades himself, the most unyielding of all the Olympians, is compelled to yield — at least partially. The compromise of the pomegranate seeds, which bind Persephone to the Underworld for a portion of each year, is the mythological expression of a truth the Greeks found everywhere in experience: that what is lost to death is never fully restored, but that the bond of love nevertheless endures, cyclically renewed, like the seasons that Demeter’s grief and recovery were understood to govern.

*Demeter Mourning for Persephone by Evelyn De Morgan, 1906

Moreover, the stories conveyed to their audiences the notion that even after death, the bond with those they loved would remain — that the Underworld was not a place of absolute severance but one which love could penetrate, if not always overcome. This is most acutely expressed in the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Ovid’s account in the Metamorphoses (10.1–77; 11.1–66) is the most elaborately beautiful in the Latin tradition, and it is worth dwelling on what Ovid describes when Orpheus descends to the world below. The Metamorphoses presents the scene with extraordinary emotional precision: Orpheus stands before Persephone and Hades and plays, and the response of the Underworld’s inhabitants is one of the most affecting passages in ancient poetry. The Furies weep for the first time; Tantalus forgets to reach for the receding water; Sisyphus sits down upon his stone; Ixion’s wheel comes to a halt; the cheeks of the Danaids are wet with tears (Metamorphoses 10.40–46). Those who are presented throughout Greek and Roman mythology as enduring eternal, mechanical suffering — figures for whom feeling itself seemed to have been extinguished — are restored to emotion by Orpheus’s music. This is the myth’s central claim: that love, expressed with sufficient art and passion, does not merely move the living but reawakens the capacity for feeling in those from whom it has been taken away. Even the steely hearts of the Underworld are susceptible to its power.

*Strigilated sarcophagus with Orpheus and a fisherman, 300 AD

Orpheus was not initially successful in his attempts to be fully reunited with Eurydice — he succeeded in stirring the gods of the dead to allow him to lead her back, but failed at the final moment because of temptation; he turned to look at her before they had cleared the threshold of the upper world, and she was drawn back into the darkness. Virgil’s account of this moment in the Georgics (4.485–527) is perhaps the most achingly restrained treatment in ancient literature. Virgil’s Orpheus turns back not out of weakness or distrust but out of an excess of love — amans, demens (‘loving’, ‘mad’, Georgics 4.488), the two words placed almost side by side, as if to say that in the myth they are the same thing. Eurydice’s last word, as she recedes, is his name. Despite this failure, however, his love endured. In multiple versions of the myth — including those preserved by Pausanias, who describes a local tradition associated with the Underworld’s geography (Pausanias 9.30.5–9.30.12) — Orpheus after Eurydice’s second loss refuses all other loves, devotes himself entirely to her memory, and is finally, in some traditions, reunited with her in death, their shades wandering the Elysian Fields together. Ovid mentions this reunion at the close of Metamorphoses Book 11: Orpheus passes into the Underworld and finds Eurydice, and they walk together in the sunless meadows, sometimes side by side, sometimes with him ahead and her following — a beautiful reversal of their catastrophic procession upward, the dynamic finally at peace (Metamorphoses 11.61–66). Love, after all the catastrophes of the myth, ultimately wins.

*Orpheus and Eurydice by Auguste Rodin, 1893

Both stories depict the immortal gods showing sympathy and deference to those who exhibited enough passion and desire to reconnect with those close to their hearts — and this theological dimension would have mattered enormously to an ancient audience. The gods of Greek and Roman religion were not, in general, sentimental figures. They were powerful, capricious, self-interested, and often indifferent to human suffering. What makes both myths so striking is the degree to which love breaks this pattern. Plato, in the Symposium, has the character Phaedrus argue that love (Eros) is the oldest and most powerful of the gods, and that the gods themselves are moved by acts of devotion born of love: he cites Orpheus as a counter-example in that dialogue, arguing that the gods gave him only a phantom of Eurydice because he was a coward who lacked the courage to die for love as Alcestis did (Symposium 179d). But this very engagement with the myth — debated by Plato’s sophisticated Athenians — reveals how deeply embedded these stories were in the culture’s philosophical and ethical self-reflection. Whether one concluded that Orpheus succeeded or failed, the question his myth forced was always the same: what will love dare? And what will the gods concede to it?

*Orpheus and Eurydice by Edward John Poynter, 1862 AD

It is therefore plain to see why the stories of Persephone and Eurydice resonated with people who worshipped the gods and who shared connections that they did not want to be severed even after death. Both were stories which told people that death and the Underworld were not things to be feared if proper respect to the gods was shown during life, and that the fire of love does not dwindle even in the darkness and depths of the Underworld, so long as one is prepared to fight to maintain its embers. Furthermore, the stories portray the gods as sympathetic to such mortal connections and feelings of adoration — indeed, as capable of being moved by them, of awakening within their divine hearts the same emotions that mortals feel. Hades does not laugh at Orpheus’s music. Persephone weeps with him. Zeus himself relents before Demeter’s grief. The gap between mortal and divine is, in these myths, briefly closed by love — and for a worshipper praying to those same gods, that was a deeply consoling theological proposition.

*Terracotta group of two seated women, perhaps Demeter and Persephone, 180 BC

For these reasons, the stories of Eurydice and Persephone were depicted in art and poetry and on funerary devices such as sarcophagi because the feelings and ideas they evoked were comforting and conciliatory for both the living and the dead. Roman sarcophagi of the second and third centuries AD frequently bear relief carvings of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth — Orpheus playing his lyre before Hades and Persephone, Eurydice being led upward by Hermes — placed on the very object in which a beloved body lay, precisely because the narrative enacted in stone what the bereaved desperately needed to believe: that love reached into the world below and moved its rulers, and that reunion was possible. The Orphic gold tablets — thin sheets of gold inscribed with ritual instructions for the soul’s journey through the Underworld, placed in graves from the fifth century BC onward — similarly suggest a religious culture in which the dead were thought to persist as feeling, conscious entities whose journey was guided by correct knowledge and whose reception by the powers below was not merely bureaucratic but responsive to the quality of the life and love they had embodied. Funerary art was a way of telling those who were mourned that their love endured regardless of death — a visual argument, carved in marble or painted in fresco, that the bond between the living and the dead was not finally broken but merely interrupted, awaiting the day when they would join hands and be reunited once more.

*Petelia Tablet, an Ancient Greek gold foil inscription, example of an Orphic tablet, 300-150 BC

Life in the Mycenaean Age

PALACES: THE MEGARON

*comparison between the plans of the megarons in Mycenae, Tiryns and Pylos

Kings ruled Mycenaean cities and these cities contained palaces. A large percentage of a city was occupied by a palace complex despite their relatively small size by modern standards. They had pleasant places where the royal family lived and relaxed but had many other purposes. Evidence suggests that palaces contained rooms for official documents, potteries, shrines, storerooms, armouries, and oil press rooms. The megaron was the most important and prominent part of the palace. Megarons were usually rectangular in shape, had an entrance room with two columns and another room known as the vestibule. A single or sometimes multiple courtyards were usually contained within the megaron. A circular stone hearth used for religious purposes or cooking was the most important internal feature. Four columns surrounded the hearth which supported the roof. Smoke from the fire of the hearth escaped through a hole in the roof. They were frequently used for feasts, Odysseus’ is described in the Odyssey when the Suitors are killed. Poetry was recited there. The megaron also housed the King’s throne.

HUNTING:

Lion Hunt Dagger:

The dagger was not made for combat because it is too intricate and precious. Instead, it was an ornamental object that would have probably belonged to a King. The biggest challenge a hunter could face was a lion, evidenced by the felled hunter on the right of the dagger. The artefact is vital evidence for showing the perilous nature of hunting. 

*the Lion Hunt Dagger, 16th Century BC, made of gold, silver and niello

Vapheio Cup:

Depicts a hunter in conflict with a bull. The bull appears to have the upper hand and be crushing the hunter. The cup is evidence of bull hunting, its perilous nature and the danger involved. The left cup also depicts bull hunting, however in this case the hunter is upright, on both of his feet, in conflict with the bull. The cups are incredibly ornate and intricate, indicating that they would’ve belonged to someone of high status and great wealth. They would’ve been something the host who they belonged to shared with his guests. Their ornate decoration perhaps represent the hunting exploits of their owner. 

*Vapheio Cup, Laconia, 15th Century BC

*Vapheio Cup, thought to be from Crete, 15th century BC

Mycenaean Gold Signet Ring:

Depicts a hunting scene. Two men are shown on a chariot. The man on the left is wielding a bow equipped with an arrow that he points at a leaping stag. Their chariot horse can be seen galloping across the bottom of the ring. The ring is significant as it shows the way in which the Greeks used chariots in hunting. Also, it shows the tradition of young men showing their readiness for battle in chariots; important because chariots played a big part in warfare. 

*image of Mycenaean gold signet ring, from Grave Circle A, Mycenae, 16th Century BC

Fresco, Tiryns:

Depicts a trio of dogs hunting a boar. It is significant because it evidences the Greeks’ use of dogs in hunting. They probably used them in this way because the hunter was faced with little to no risk to his person to get meat; all he stood to lose were his dogs. 

*fresco depicting dogs hunting a boar from Tiryns, 13th or 12th century BC

ARMOUR AND WEAPONS:

Note:

Homer’s descriptions of armour and weapons in the Iliad and Odyssey are most likely not period correct. Homer wrote about 500 years after when the Trojan War is suspected to have taken place, so armour and weapons from different times were probably assimilated into his narratives. This is why using Homeric evidence for armour and weapons is difficult.

SHIELDS:

Mycenaean wall painting of a figure of eight shield leaning against a wall:

The image below depicts a figure of eight shield leaning against a wall. It is vital evidence for confirming their use in the early – mid Mycenaean Age. The wall painting was probably produced in the time before they were phased out. The shield is thought to have been made of several layers of ox hide stretched over a wooden frame with a central vertical bar grip. The shield was designed to cover the whole body, head to heel.

*wall painting of figure of eight shield, Mycenae, 15 century BC

Minoan wall painting depicting hunting procession:

The wall painting depicts a hunting procession. It is significant because it highlights the fact that the hides of many different animals were used in the process of shield making and that the long rectangular, full body shield design was used in the Minoan Age. These shield were made from layers of ox hide over a wooden frame. The Greek hero Ajax is described by Homer as having wielded a shield made up of eight layers of leather and of bronze in the Iliad. 

*wall painting from Akrotiri (Minoan), 16th century BC

HELMETS:

Helmets were very important to the Mycenaeans and they evolved over time. 

Mycenaean boars’ tusk helmet:

The boars’ tusk helmet would’ve been a statement piece belonging to someone with great hunting prowess or who ruled others with great hunting prowess. It is thought the boars’ tusks were put on top of a leather cap covered with felt. This type of helmet was used in the Early Mycenaean Age. Good protection was provided by the tusks which were very strong; each helmet was comprised of the tusks of at least ten wild boars. A hat Odysseus once wore described in the Iliad was made of a leather cap, covered with felt and boars’ tusks on the outside. Hunting such creatures was incredibly dangerous, evidenced by the injury Odysseus sustained whilst hunting a wild boar in the Odyssey. The helmets described in the Iliad are gleaming and have animal skin lining, unlike the boars’ tusk helmets. 

*Mycenaean boars’ tusk helmet, chamber tomb 515, Mycenae, 14th century BC

Head of a soldier from chamber tomb 27:

The artefact is evidence of the use of chin straps on helmets. There is evidence to suggest such straps looked very impressive and provided the wearer with additional protection from stabs to the neck. 

*head of a soldier from chamber tomb 27, 14th-13th century BC

Mycenaean fresco depicting two soldiers on a chariot:

The fresco depicts two soldiers, one on a chariot and the other walking. They are shown wearing bronze helmets. It is important evidence of material use and helmet design changes over time as the ones they are wearing are clearly bronze but have no chin straps, unlike the artefact from chamber tomb 27. The fresco is also evidence of the use of chariots in warfare. 

*Mycenaean fresco depicting two soldiers on a chariot from Pylos, approx. 1350 BC

Mycenaean warrior vase (krater):

Depicts a battleline of soldiers. They are shown marching and carrying long spears as well as small, round shields. They wear tunics, breast plates and greaves for protection. On their spears they carry knapsacks, suggesting their travels are over log distances. Horns stand erect from their helmets which appear to be somewhat lightweight. On the far left a woman can be seen, presumably waving goodbye. Some of the soldiers on the vase wear helmets that make them look like hedgehogs and they carry shorter spears. The vase is significant because it is evidence of what soldiers wore and carried and together with other Mycenaean artefacts depicting soldiers shows how these things developed over time. 

*face of Mycenaean warrior vase (krater), made of clay, 13th century BC

side of Mycenaean warrior vase (krater), made of clay, 13th century BC

face of Mycenaean warrior vase (krater), made of clay, 13th century BC

SPEARS:

Mycenaean swords consisted of a wooden handle with a bronze spearhead. By the end of the 12th century, spears become shorter and designed for throwing. Linear B tablets serve as evidence of Mycenaean spears.

SWORDS:

Many Mycenaean swords have been found in tombs. They became shorter as time went on.

*hilt of a sword from Mycenaean tomb, 17th-16th century BC

Note:

We must remember that these weapons were most likely not used in battle. They are often very intricate and precious, designed for burial and as a symbol of status and wealth. 

BOWS AND ARROWS:

Bows and arrows were very commonly used. Many were recorded in the Linear B tablets.

Teucer is the most prominent archer in the Iliad. He works in tandem with Ajax to fire at the enemy behind Ajax’s shield, evidence of team based archer skills. He picks off Trojan warriors constantly, killing named heroes. Pandaros is an aristocrat who is a talented archer but not a foot soldier. He wounds Diomedes and shoots Menelaus. Paris uses the bow almost exclusively. He wounds Diomedes and is described as shooting tactically from a protected position. In Homer, spears dominate most of the action. However, archers are depicted as operating as skirmishers alongside infantry. They often shoot from defensible positions, support assaults and target specific officers. The attitude towards archers in Homer is mixed; their skill is admired but seems to be a less heroic form of direct duelling, evidenced by Hector’s mocking of Paris and Odysseus’ decision to leave his bow at home.

*Greek red-figure vase depicting Artemis and Actaeon, 470 BC

ARMOUR:

Dendra panoply, 15th century BC:

The armour consists of 15 separate bronze plates. It was found with a boars’ tusk helmet, a wrist guard and a pair of greaves. It is made of sheets of bronze hinged together with leather. The armour would’ve been very protective, sturdy and terrifying. It is, however, very different to other Mycenaean armour examples.

*Dendra panoply, 15th century BC

CHARIOTS:

Chariots were a key aspect of Mycenaean life. They are regularly shown on stelai, pottery and paintings. Chasing prey in hunting was what they were used for most of all, but they were also used in war. Their use is depicted often in the Iliad, when they are usually driven into the centre of the fighting, before dropping a warrior off in the battlefield to fight on foot. When the warrior was finished fighting, a chariot was responsible for picking him up and driving them elsewhere. Also, in the Iliad as part of funeral events and games chariots were raced against each other. 

Grave stelai from Grave Circle A in Mycenae:

The Grave stelai shows a simple two-wheeled box chariot carrying a man, either during a race or in battle. Four spokes are usually found on chariots of this kind. The signet ring shown in the hunting section depicts a similar kind of chariot. Such chariots may have travelled on roads. 

*grave stelai from Grave Circle A in Mycenae, 1600-1500 BC

Fresco depicting women on a chariot, from Tiryns:

Both frecoes from Tiryns and the one from Pylos shown in the helmets section show a very spacious chariot covered in red or yellow fabric or animal hide. The fresco from Tiryns is evidence that chariots were a mode of transport outside of warfare and competition, for both men and women.

*fresco depicting women on chariot, from Tiryns, 14th-13th century BC

The Linear B tablets

*images of some of the Linear B tablets, 1400-1200 BC

On what the tablets tell us about religion

The Linear B tablets tell us how the Greek’s religious beliefs developed. Several of the main Olympian gods are revealed on the tablets, as well as female versions of Poseidon and Zeus called Posidaia and Diwia. Beyond the Mycenaean age these female identities did not exist. Interestingly, the most frequently mentioned god on the tablets was Poseidon, receiving major offerings and in some cases referred to as Poseidon the wanax, suggesting a supreme rank. Also, potnia, a word meaning mistress or lady appears often, perhaps referring to a generalised goddess figure or multiple different goddesses. Amongst the titles mentioned are ‘Potnia of Grain’, ‘Potnia of Horses’ and ‘Potnia of the Labyrinth’. Listed on the tablets are priests, priestesses, temple attendents, key-bearers, servitors and cult workers; religious offices often appear as occupied by women as well as men. On the same tablets there are references to sacred precincts known as tenemoi, cult buildings and sanctuary property. The implication is that organised religious institutions held land. On a tablet from Knossos humans are included amongst offerings alongside animals. There is a great debate over whether this is evidence of a record of human sacrifice or simply festival personnel listed together with the animals. 

*tablet from Knossos, middle 13th century BC

On what (later) Greek words are in the tablets

The spelling of some of the words found in the Linear B tablets changed very little over the centuries, surviving over time in other languages. Chrusos is the word for gold in Greek; it appears in Linear B as karuso. Words such as pamako, meaning medicine, through ancient Greek, came to be used in English; our word being pharmacy. In Linear B, tripode is written; tripod is now common English and has the same meaning. The language of the Mycenaeans was generally thought to have been eradicated by the arrival of later Greeks before Linear B’s discovery.

Now, many common Greek words are known to have appeared in early Mycenaean forms. This is evidence that certain aspects of Mycenaean culture, including language, survived into later times and that Greek religion and language has very deep roots. Many administrative and social terms are listed on the tablets, and exist as very early Greek political vocabulary. Measurements and numbers, clearly Greek, also appear.

*tablet from Knossos, 1400-1350 BC

On what trade products are listed in the tablets

Food and agricultural produce from Mycenaean times are recorded in the Linear B tablets. Wine production is recorded on a tablet from Knossos, on which mention is made of 420 vines and a wine store of 14000 litres. Eumedes receiving a delivery of 518 litres of oil from Kolakas is recorded on one tablet. Barley, figs and wheat are also recorded. The religious offering of honey by an official in charge of the substance is mentioned. Coriander, saffron and other spices are recorded. Whitefoot, Dapple, Dusky and other plough oxen are named. Goats and pigs appear, as well as horses, listed as a part of a military equipment store. Products like textiles, wool, cheese and animal hides appear. Other manufactured goods such as metalwork items (cauldrons, vessels, blades, razors, weapons and bronze tools) are recorded. So too are a variety of raw materials; metals, stone, minerals, as well as perfume ingredients, which suggest long-distance trade networks. Wood and timber listings are rarely detailed but appear as logs and speciality wood for the construction of chariots, furniture and ships. Luxury items are detailed; ivory (uncommon, but present), certain glass forms, and textile dyes. Pottery is mentioned, but not explicitly; items such as stirrup jars, other types of jars, and ceramic tripods. Evidence from the Linear B tablets confirm that Mycenaean pottery was a major export across the Mediterranean. 

*close-up of a tablet from Knossos, approx. 1400 BC

On what we learn about military organisation from the tablets

Detail of the struggles of individual Mycenaean cities and information relating to their military organisation still survive through the tablets. Forty-two bronze pointed spears are listed on the tablets from Knossos. On the tablets from Pylos, bronze is listed as being provided by officials for ships, arrows and spears and other weapons needed in case of attack. Parts for chariots such as frames and wheels are also recorded on the tablets. The tablets from Pylos mention 117 pairs of wheels. The evidence in Linear B for military equipment is rich, particularly on the tablets from Knossos and Pylos. The sheer volume of references to chariots and chariot components is evidence of the importance of chariots as military devices as well as for ceremonial purposes. The Linear B tablets also show a clear command structure within society in Mycenaean times:

• The supreme authority is listed as the wanax, the allocator of resources for warfare. The wanax received religious offerings in the same way as a god might. The wanax is also referenced in epithets, in the same way as a god. These and other pieces of evidence suggests the wanax had a semi-deific status and was a sacral king.
• The lawegetas is referred to as ‘the leader of the laos (people)’. It is likely that the role was chief military commander, second only to the wanax.
• In the middle of the hierarchical structure and below the top level of command, the Linear B tablets reference the hequetai, perhaps a royal guard, a cavalry, or noble soldiers. Regardless, they would’ve been elite warriors who received rations and equipment. 
• The basileus is known to have been a village head or local chieftain who might have had a duty to defend the local area. 
• Below the basileus were officials who attended to duties on a local level. Provincial and deputy governors and watchmen, frontier and coastal guards are the types of people listed on the Pylos Linear B tablets. The tablets also show a system of obligations and conscriptions related to allocations of land and status. Examples include rowers, oarsmen and other men assigned to naval service, chariot crews and armour bearers, as well as garrison troops responsible for occupying watch posts and guarding certain areas. The listings on the Linear B tablets is unequivocal evidence of Mycenaean naval forces and organisation. 600 rowers are listed at Pylos at one time; a clearly structured force is apparent. Perhaps the most pertinent evidence of all is that relating to logistics; the allotment of bronze for weapons, the recording of chariot parts, distributed rations, maintenance and repair tracking and the allocation of land to soldiers in return for service. All of these listings evidence a wartime supply system which was bureaucratic and well assembled.

*tablet from Pylos, 14th-13th century BC

Mycenaean decorative arts techniques

Fresco:

*Mycenaean Lady fresco, 13th century BC

Frescoes can be made in a couple of different ways. The first technique is known as the buon fresco or true fresco. For this, the wall must first be prepared; plaster is applied as a rough base layer directly onto the masonry. It is made of coarse materials. Wet lime plaster is then spread in small sections on top of the base. Following this, brushed onto the still wet lime plaster are pigments mixed with water. These pigments are locked into the wall as the lime carbonises, returning to a solid crystalline form. A fresco artist is only able to paint that which can be done in a single day as the lime they paint onto must be wet and it dries quickly.

Another way is fresco secco or dry fresco. For this, pigments are mixed with another substance known as a binder before they are painted onto dry plaster. Dry frescos are much less durable as the paint can flake away over time. They are, however, easier to correct. 

It must be noted that many artists have combined the true fresco and dry fresco techniques; painting using pigments (a secco) mixed with a binder onto fresh plaster (a fresco). However, combining fresco and secco techniques can never be as durable as true buon fresco.

During the painting of frescoes, string would have been used to set out lines during the composition, which can still be seen on ancient examples.

The common pigments found in frescoes are earth pigments; mineral substances which are very stable. These include white (lime – air hydrated), black (vine black, ivory black, charcoal), green earth (‘terre verte’ – iron silicates), brown ochre (umber), yellow ochre (hydrated iron oxide), red ochre (iron oxide, haematite) and lapis lazuli (aluminium silicate containing sulfur).

Repoussé:

*Mask of Agamemnon funerary mask, 1550-1500 BC, is an example of Mycenaean repoussé

Repoussé is a metalworking technique that was used to shape metal into three dimensional forms with a sense of depth. Usually, the metal was hammered from the reverse side of the object so the scene would face out. 

The metals most commonly used in repoussé are those that are soft enough to shape without cracking. These include copper, brass, silver, gold, and tin. 

First, the metal must be softened and heated until is glows dull red. It must then be cooled by quenching. This process softens the metal so it can be worked. This process of heating and cooling is known as annealing and would have been repeated several times during composition. 

Following this, the metal sheet is placed upon a supportive surface known as a pitch, backing the metal and allowing it to stretch.

The metal is then hammered from the back using hammers and rounded punches, pushing the metal outward and forming the raised shapes. 

The metal is flipped to the front and finer tools are used to further define the metal and clarify the image. These are the main processes involved in repoussé and any further work may have involved refining, polishing or reinforcing the composition. 

Inlay:

*Mycenaean bronze daggers and scabbard fragments, 1550-1500 BC, feature the inlay technique

Inlay is a technique in which one metal is heated and laid over another in an object. The contrasting pieces of metal may sit flush or with one raised slightly above the other, creating patterns or images. It is a decorative method rather than one which primarily involves shaping. Carvings, hollows or cuts were made on the base object before the upper material was inserted and fixed into the recesses. The two materials appear as one once the surface is smoothed. 

The most common base materials used in Mycenaean inlay were wood, metal, stone, shell ivory or bone. Inlay materials may have been precious metals, stones, mother-of-pearl, ivory, bone, horn, coloured woods or glass. 

Famous examples of Mycenaean objects with inlay include the Lion Hunt Dagger and the dagger blades from Grave Circle A. The former has a bronze blade and inlaid gold and silver lions attacking hunters. It is one of the finest examples of Mycenaean metal inlay. The latter are bronze blades inlaid with gold, silver and niello. They depict hunting scenes and showcase extraordinary craftsmanship. 

Cloisonné:

Cloisonné is a technique where glass and gemstones are inlaid on a fine wire attached to a metal surface to form small compartments filled with coloured material. It is a decorative method in which cell-like patterns are made, defined by metal lines. 

First, cleaning and smoothing of a metal object occurs. Thin metal wires were then bent into shape before being soldered or glued to the surface of the metal. The bends in the wire were filled with stones, glass, enamel, or paste, and fired so the material melted and hardened when cooled. The object might undergo this firing process multiple times. In the final step the surface is finished; ground and polished. 

Examples of Mycenaean objects made using cloisonné include the gold rosette and plaque ornaments found in Grave Circle A and gold jewellery.

It is important to note that Mycenaean cloisonné techniques were also used on objects that featured inlay techniques such as the Lion Hunt Dagger. In this artefact, cloisonné is used to define the figures using gold strips and inlay is used to fill them. Cloisonné and inlay are used in parallel with one another, in gold cloisonné inlay. Later Byzantine cloisonné featured enamel more prominently.

*Beresford Hope Cross, 9th century AD, featuring cloisonné enamelling

Granulation:

*Minoan Malia Pendant, 1800-1700 BC, featuring granulation

Granulation is a metalworking technique where tiny metal beads are attached to a metal surface to create decorative patterns and textures. Gold jewellery often features granulation.

In the process, very small pieces of gold are heated, forming them into small spheres. The base metal surface is prepared; cleaned and slightly roughened, before it is adorned with these pieces. They would have been arranged in patterns and fixed with a temporary adhesive. Following this, heating of the object occurs in a charcoal furnace or over a hearth. The temperature is made to be just below the melting point of gold. Diffusion bonding takes place between the two surfaces, and they became homogenous without visible soldering. 

The object is then cooled and finished. 

Famous examples of Mycenaean artefacts made using granulation is the gold jewellery found in Grave Circle A. Gold earrings, pendants, beads, ornaments, and diadems, and other small luxury objects all feature this technique. The famous Mycenaean gold lion rhyton also features granulation. 

*gold Mycenaean lion rhyton, mid 16th century BC

A note on Mycenaean pottery patterns

In Mycenaean pottery, geometric patterns are most commonly seen. Triangles, zigzags, spirals, circles, chevrons are all continuously repeated motifs and are usually arranged in horizontal bands on pottery.

*Mycenaean stirrup jar, 1300-1230 BC

The influence of earlier Minoan art can be seen on pottery with marine and other stylised natural motifs in the form of octopus, seaweed or reeds, Nautilus shells and flora. However, Mycenaean pottery with these designs is much more repetitive, controlled and symmetrical than the earlier Minoan pieces. 

*Mycenaean krater featuring octopus design, 1400-1200 BC

*Minoan marine style octopus vase, 1500-1450 BC

Animal motifs appear abundantly in later Mycenaean pottery. Birds, fish, bulls, and horses are all animals usually shown in profile and with patterns surrounding them. Also, during later Mycenaean times, particularly on large kraters, human scenes involving chariots are depicted.

*Mycenaean bell krater decorated with a bull and egret on each side, 1300-1200 BC

A brief word on the famous Mycenaean gold rhyton found in Grave Circle A

A rhyton was a ceremonial drinking or libation vessel, often featuring a tapered end for the pouring of liquids. They would have most likely been used in offerings, rituals, or feasts. They are made from sheets of gold hammered over a core using the repoussé technique. Their eyes, facial features and mane were probably chased. Mycenaean rhytons are perfect examples of the Mycenaean’s exceptional metallurgy skills and their ability to execute precise shaping and fine detail on metal objects. 

Relative to other Mycenaean depictions of animals, the rhyton looks rather natural; his physiognomy and mane are somewhat lifelike. It is a very imposing looking object and succeeds in capturing the lion’s intimidating appearance. It would have belonged to someone of elite status, which is evident in its design and execution. It would have been an effective statement of social standing and societal prestige. 

Mycenaean clothing

Wool and linen clothing:

Mycenaean clothing was made from flax plant fibres. It would have been dyed with natural products together with binders such as urine or vinegar, which preserved the garment. Silk garments would have existed but were probably very rare. 

*Minoan Procession Fresco 16th-14th century BC

Dyes:

Yellow dye was produced using saffron or onion skins, red using madder or insect eggs, blue using indigo, and purple using shellfish ink. Purple and blue were harder to obtain and therefore more expensive. 

*detail from the Minoan Adorants Fresco, 16th century BC

Wrap-around skirts:

Wrap-around skirts were a very common item of female clothing. A tiered effect was produced by several thin layers. The skirts would have been very colourful and technically demanding to make. An under skirt was probably worn as well. There is evidence of both longer and shorter versions of this kind of skirt on rings and frescoes from sites in Mycenaean Greece.

*reproduction of a fragment from the Ladies in Blue Mycenaean mural, 14th-13th century BC

Blouses:

Blouses were short sleaved. Women’s breasts may not have been covered at all. There is evidence on frescoes of blouses which accentuate the breasts and others on which women are bare breasted. It is likely that as well as blouses, women wore shawls, cloaks, and robes.

*Mycenaean Lady fresco, 13th century BC

*Mycenaean Lady of Tiryns fresco, 13th century BC

JEWELLERY:

There is strong evidence to suggest women wore several different types of jewellery. These included ankle bracelets and ornate headbands. The woman in the Mycenaean Lady fresco wears a bracelet and necklace and holds another bracelet in her hand.

*Mycenaean diadem or headband, 16th century BC

*Mycenaean gold necklace, 15th-14th century BC

MALE GARMENTS:

Men would have worn a robe and underneath a short sleaved, braided tunic. There is evidence to suggest garments resembling kilts were worn, particularly by soldiers. Underwear comprised a sort of loincloth, and footwear, if an individual wore any at all, would have been leather boots, as shown on the Warrior Vase.

*fragment of a fresco, depicting a high status individual, approx. 1350BC

Complete summary of Book IV of Homer’s Odyssey

An epithet is used at the beginning of the book to describe Odysseus as ‘a man of many resources’. 

Odysseus expresses the ‘grief’ he will feel whilst he narrates his troubles to King Alcinous of Phaeacia. But he must do so according to the laws of xenia, because his host has asked him to. Odysseus reveals himself to King Alcinous as King Odysseus of Ithaca. This revelation commands Alcinous’ respect and honour. He briefly describes Ithaca, conveying his love for his homeland. He then explains how Troy fell, the beginnings of his journey, and his suffering at the hands of the gods. 

*Roman marble bust of Odysseus, 1st century AD or early 2nd century AD

He begins by telling of the Cicones, a race of Trojan allies. Odysseus and his men sack Ismarus, looting the city in the process. He urges his men to leave the city quickly, but they refuse and instead stay to feast and drink. He expresses his indignation. Odysseus and his men suffer from a counterattack launched by the Cicones who have regrouped. A simile is used in this passage. Six men per ship are lost before the rest including Odysseus escape. This encounter marks the first loss of men Odysseus suffers. 

Having left the land of the Cicones, Odysseus laments the loss of his fallen, ‘saluting them three times’ before they depart. Tricolon is used here. This shows the respect he has for his men. The fleet is blown off course by a storm sent by Zeus; Odysseus and his men spend nine days on the ocean, and on the tenth they reach the land of the Lotus Eaters. Odysseus sends three men inland. The lotus offered by the lotus eaters is eaten by the men, making them forget Ithaca and abandon their desire to return home. Odysseus must forcibly drag them back to the ships before he orders an immediate departure. 

*Roman marble statue of Odysseus, late 3rd-middle 2nd century BC

An epithet is used to describe Dawn, one of many. Odysseus and his men then arrive in the land of the Cyclopes whom he describes as a lawless and violent race who do not fear the gods. They do not farm or govern their lands; they do not care for their neighbours, they are, according to Odysseus, a terrible bunch. However, several of their practices would suggest they are civilized. Odysseus suggests that the Cyclopes cannot build boats like civilized Greeks can, but that if they could, they would be much better for it. He also says that the land of the Cyclopes is in fact, very nice, in sharp contrast to the giants who occupy them. Odysseus makes sure to emphasise the Cyclopes’ isolation and general lack of custom which stems, according to him, from malignance. 

They land on the Cyclopes’ shore, on a smaller island, where Odysseus and his men hunt goats and feast on them. Odysseus’ judgement here may be judged to be poor and rather foolhardy for this is no way to properly behave on a prospective hosts’ land. 

Sailing to the Cyclopes’ mainland having selected twelve men, Odysseus enters a large cave in which there are many nice things, including dairy products and livestock. At this stage Odysseus hopes that he and his men might receive gifts of hospitality, and all the pleasantries associated with xenia. Most of the tings in Polyphemus’ domain seem perfectly respectable and harmless. Regardless, what he sees in the cave does not change his mind that Polyphemus is a horrible being when he comes to meet him, perhaps unfairly so. Whilst Odysseus’ men are keen to leave quickly with stolen supplies, Odysseus wishes to stay and meet the inhabitant of the cave, thereby demanding his hospitality. They feast on Polyphemus’ cheeses and lay down to rest. It is reasonable to say here that if Odysseus does not want to be treated harshly by Polyphemus upon his return, eating his cheese without permission is probably not the best thing to do. This signals poor judgement and appreciation of the situation. 

Polyphemus returns with some firewood to his cave, as any shepherd might, before blocking the entrance with a stone which ‘twenty-two four-wheeled wagons could not shift’. Odysseus then conveys the careful way in which Polyphemus milks his goats ‘methodically’, making sure everything is done correctly. The diligence with which Polyphemus carries out these tasks contrasts sharply with the monstrous impression Odysseus has given. Polyphemus then spies Odysseus and his men. The way he speaks to them here violates all the customs associated with xenia as he immediately asks the intruders a trio of questions, one after the other, very aggressively. If he were a good host, he would ask them where they came from and who they are only after offering them food, rest and peace from wandering. However, as soon as Polyphemus disregards this approach, Odysseus says, ‘their hearts sank’. 

*Roman marble head depicting Polyphemus, 100-200 AD

Nevertheless, Odysseus tells Polyphemus who he and his men are and requests that they be treated with the respect and the reverence due to guests who have wandered far. He implores Polyphemus to do the duty expected of him by the gods, but Polyphemus replies in stark terms, telling Odysseus that he is a fool if he thinks the Cyclopes fear the gods. Instead, he says, they are greater than the gods. One can readily imagine how this adds to Odysseus’ concerns for he and his men’s safety. 

Polyphemus then asks in comparatively polite terms where Odysseus’ ship is. In this passage Odysseus’ self-vanity is on display as he commends himself for having had the wits to give Polyphemus a false reply. He tells the giant that they were wrecked. What comes next is very significant as it is the first act of violence on behalf of Polyphemus; a very gory passage in which he smashes Odysseus’ men against the walls of the cave, and it is delineated how their brains pour forth from their skulls. He brutalises them before he feasts upon them. A truly shocking moment, it is a culmination of the tension that has been gradually building as suddenly the audience is made aware of the abhorrent violence Polyphemus is capable of. 

After his feast, Polyphemus stretches out to sleep. Odysseus is left wandering what he is to do next and very quickly devises a strategically sound plan which involves using a piece of olive wood he himself likens to ‘the mast of some ship’ to blind Polyphemus with. This simile is very effective is conveying the sheer magnitude of the objects within Polyphemus’ cave and further reinforces the Aecheans’ tendency toward seafaring. Odysseus chooses four of his most capable men to carry out the blinding. 

*Proto-Attic amphora depicting the blinding of the Cyclops Polyphemus by Odysseus and his men, 670-660 BC

Once again, Odysseus shows his cunning when he asks Polyphemus try some of his Greek wine that he brought with him in the hopes of having a warmer reception and not being eaten. The Cyclops is very tempted and drinks from the bowl before expressing great delight and warm thanks for the delicious beverage. He likens it to ‘sweet nectar’ and ‘ambrosia’, the food of the gods. He asks for some more. Suffice to say, Odysseus succeeds in making Polyphemus inebriated to the extent that he draws from him the promise that he will eat Odysseus or ‘Nobody’ (he has told Polyphemus he is called Nobody) only after he has finished with the rest of his men, thus prolonging his life a little more. The Polyphemus says this will be the gift he will give in return for the wine.

*polychrome krater fragment depicting the blinding of the Cyclops Polyphemus by Odysseus and his men, 7th century BC

Polyphemus falls asleep before he vomits a mixture comprised of both the wine and human flesh he has eaten, in a truly disgusting piece of description. Equally gut wrenching is the description of how Odysseus and his men twist and force the red-hot olive wood into the Cyclops eye to ensure maximum damage is inflicted. Two similes are used here; the first is another ship reference. This time Odysseus likens the olive wood spear and its rotating motion to a ship drill, boring a hole in the side of a ship. The hissing that occurs when the spear meets the eye, Odysseus compares to the moment at which a blacksmith quenches his work in water, as the blade cools. This is particularly noteworthy as from these similes one can get a strong impression of the things that a Greek would have been most familiar with; namely, ships and ironwork. 

Quite understandably, Polyphemus screams in pain. The other Cyclopes awake, hear him and ask what the matter is. He says that it is the treachery of Nobody doing him harm, not violence. Nobody, of course, is the name Odysseus gave for himself. Cunning, Odysseus thinks to himself. Also important in this passage is the way in which Homer manipulates the intricacies of Greek spelling to highlight Odysseus’ cleverness. Met is, spelled as two distinct words, is Greek for ‘no one’, but metis as a singular word means ‘resourcefulness, wily scheme’. It is humorous to Odysseus because his metis has foiled the Cyclops, and to Homer because it is a very witty pun.

*part of the Blinding of Polyphemus sculpture group, and of the larger Sperlonga sculpture group, 14-37 AD

Next, Odysseus, in a passage which is equal parts heroic and dramatic, racks his brains for what to do as Polyphemus waves his arms about in a frenzy, trying to catch Odysseus’ men. Again, Odysseus comes up with a plan to foil Polyphemus. He and his men grasp on to the underside of the Cyclops’ cattle as they leave the cave in the hope that he will not be able to feel they are there. To make him finding them less likely, Odysseus straps three rams together for each man to leave under. The plan works, but it puzzles Polyphemus as to why the ram who is usually the first to leave is lagging behind. Of course, it is the one under which Odysseus hangs, but regardless, the Cyclops is unaware of his presence. 

Odysseus and his men escape the cave and board their ships. However, before long, Odysseus is hurling audible insults at Polyphemus from his departing ship. Polyphemus tears a chunk of rock from the cliff and hurls it in Odysseus’ direction, causing a swell which very nearly beaches them. They manage to push off before Odysseus resumes his barrage of verbal abuse to the dismay of his men who implore him to stop lest Polyphemus take any further action. This is extremely poor judgement on Odysseus’ part, to put he and his men in such danger as they were on the brink of escape. It is evidence of his unflinching desire to get the one up on any adversary he encounters, not always physically, but mentally, and, by extension, verbally. He makes certain before he leaves that Polyphemus knows exactly who he is and from what line he is descended, his status as the great King of Ithaca who sailed for Troy.

Polyphemus expresses dismay before he acknowledges that he was told by a Soothsayer that the things Odysseus has enacted would happen to him in the future but that he ignored the warnings. This is significant as it shows that despite their apparent disregard for the gods, religious figures like soothsayers do indeed live amongst the Cyclopes and offer advice to them.

*Odysseus Drawing His Bow, lithograph by Armand Joseph Bonamy, 1910

The final major verbal bombshell that lands in this exchange is delivered by Polyphemus as he makes sure that Odysseus knows his father is Poseidon the earthshaker and that he should not be surprised if retribution comes his way, and, not only that, but this father may also have the power to heal the wound inflicted upon him by Odysseus. This significantly tarnishes a great victory for Odysseus, withstanding the loss of his men, and leaves him and his remaining crew with feelings of dark foreboding for what is to come. The note on which the book ends is bitter-sweet. Odysseus and a number of his men have survived but heavy casualties have been suffered, and the worst may be yet to come. 

Examples of interactions between Odysseus and his men and what they show about his leadership in Odyssey

From beginning of Book IX:

At the very beginning of Book IX, one of the first encounters Odysseus recounts to King Alcinous of Phaeacia is the one he and his men had with the Cicones. He tells of how they plundered Ismarus, the Cicone city, taking women and valuables, before Odysseus suggested they leave quickly. However, his ‘fools of men refused’ and so they remained and enjoyed the pleasurable things they stole from the Cicones on their own land. This proves to be a terrible mistake as the Cicones regroup and launch a counterattack, which results in a battle and the death of six of Odysseus’ men. Soon after, his devastated crew laments the loss of their fallen, ‘saluting them three times’ before they depart. 

*Odysseus before Alcinous, King of the Phaeacians by August Malmström

This interaction between Odysseus and his men illustrates a major failure on Odysseus’ part to show good leadership. In this instance, he shows a lack of authority in capitulating to his men’s desire to remain in dangerous territory. It is strongly implied Odysseus knew that if he and his men stayed on the island, they would inevitably be subject to a counter assault, once their enemy had had time to regroup and recover. Odysseus had the opportunity to prevent the death of his men by using his authority to insist that they leave immediately, despite push back from his crew. This is suggestive of a culpability on Odysseus’ part, and that despite his strong feelings on the situation, he did not persist in resisting the self-destructive impulses of his crew, as a better leader might have. The funeral rites Odysseus performs in memory of his fallen, in which he ‘salut[es] them three times’ shows that he has great respect for his men. It may also be a subtle expression of the regret he feels over his failure to save his fallen, although this is not clearly stated. Nevertheless, it gives Odysseus and what remains of his crew an opportunity to grieve for their fallen comrades before moving on. 

In Polyphemus’ cave:

Whilst there are numerous examples of Odysseus’ poor decision making in Book IX and in the build-up to his encounter with Polyphemus in particular, his efforts to get his crew out of the cave exhibit some of his finest leadership qualities. Throughout the ordeal, he succeeds in keeping his men calm, which greatly improves their chances of escape. He formulates a strategically sound plan that he enacts with precision and diligence. He first devises how to blind the Cyclops using the olive wood stake; inebriating Polyphemus so that it will be much easier to carry out. He shows intelligence and cunning in the passage where he tells Polyphemus his name is Nobody, which results in the Cyclops receiving no assistance from his comrades. A similar strategic brilliance is shown by Odysseus in his plan to cling to the underside of Polyphemus’ sheep as a way of escaping captivity. 

*Odysseus in the Cave of Polyphemus by Jacob Jordaens

These examples prove that Odysseus not only possesses tactical shrewdness but also a calmness under extreme pressure and an ability to execute necessary tasks without being impacted by the realisation that failure would lead to the certain death of himself and his crew. 

In the immediate aftermath of the escape from Polyphemus’ cave:

The events which comprise the immediate aftermath of Odysseus and his men’s escape from Polyphemus’ cave offer another very pertinent example of major leadership failure. As soon as Odysseus and his men succeed in boarding their ship and pushing off from shore to the comparative safety of open water, Odysseus begins to hurl insults at Polyphemus. This prompts Polyphemus to tear a chunk of rock from the cliff face and hurl it in the direction of Odysseus’ ship, causing a swell which very nearly beaches them. They manage to push off once more before Odysseus resumes his barrage of verbal abuse, to the dismay of his men who implore him to stop lest he incur any more of the Cyclops’ wrath. He continues despite their efforts, and the exchange of insults only concludes once Polyphemus delivers the bombshell news that his father is Poseidon and that he will inevitably punish Odysseus for the harm he has done his beloved son. 

This is clear cut evidence of Odysseus’ innate desire, even need, to ensure that his adversary knows that he has outplayed and outwitted them. He must be satisfied before he leaves that Polyphemus knows exactly who he is and the line from which he is descended, even though it will make Polyphemus aware of his crews’ impending escape and jeopardise their efforts to survive. Odysseus’ decision to tell Polyphemus who he is vastly widens the scope for potential retribution, a consequence which should have prevented Odysseus from revealing such compromising information. Interestingly, this scenario is the opposite of the previous one, as the role Odysseus plays and the role his men play is reversed. In the first example with the Cicones, it is Odysseus urging his men to come to reason and do that which is in their best interests. In this one, it’s Odysseus’ men who implore him to do so. As leader, it is Odysseus’ duty to lead by example and to act in the best interests of his crew. To show consistency and moral authority is to command respect from one’s crew, which is something Odysseus does not achieve in this instance. It is undeniable that the plans Odysseus devises and the actions he takes to get himself and his men out of Polyphemus’ cave are nothing short of heroic and prove his strategic genius. Nevertheless, one cannot ignore the fact that it is his duty to put the lives of his crew above all else, even if that means negating his own ego driven impulses. He should have realised that just as his crew’s decision to ignore his instructions resulted in disaster before, his failure to show respect or deference to the wishes of his crew would have the same consequences. Odysseus in many instances fails to learn from previous disasters and to adapt his approach in subsequent encounters. This event shows there exists a disconnect between Odysseus and his men, a chasm which Odysseus widens further as his men die, one by one. 

With the Sirens:

Odysseus’ ability to realise the severity of a developing situation and to pre-empt disaster is evident in his handling of his crew’s encounter with the Sirens, a race of dangerous creatures with powers of enchantment. 

Knowing that they will be sailing within earshot of the Sirens’ possessive calls, because of Circe’s warning, Odysseus warns his crew of the imminent danger they pose, and commands that they all stuff their ears with beeswax, so as to to be deaf to the Sirens’ calls. In addition to this, he orders them to fasten him to the ship’s mast so that he can hear the Sirens’ song without being able to move toward it. He instructs them to not under any conditions release him, regardless of anything he might say whilst enchanted. 

*Ulysses and the Sirens by Herbert James Draper

It is here that Odysseus exhibits tremendous self-awareness and an ability to formulate a cohesive plan whilst taking account of all the potential stumbling blocks. He shows a trust in his crew to carry out his orders despite knowing that failure to do so will most definitely result in death. Therefore, he makes sure to establish firm rules before they encounter the Sirens, using instructions that are clear, concise and easy to understand. 

On the way in which Homer makes the reader feel sympathetic toward otherwise dangerous characters in Odyssey

Throughout the Odyssey, there are numerous characters Odysseus and his men encounter whose actions are abhorrent, but who possess certain qualities which make the reader feel sympathetic toward them in some way. It is one of the elements of Homer’s great epic which makes it so engaging. 

For example, Circe, whose island Odysseus and his men are blown to following their tribulations with Aeolus, is a character whose identity is somewhat vague; neither her appearance nor her domain is delineated in much detail, shrouding her in mystery. She possesses magical capabilities, but she is not divine, and seems to constantly exist in human form. She fulfils the modern criteria for a witch; she lives in the woods surrounded by wild animals, brews potions, and gathers herbs, all whilst in isolation. 

*Witches’ Sabbath by Francisco Goya, 1798 AD

During the very first encounter Odysseus’ men have with Circe, she welcomes them into her house and uses her ointment to transform them into pigs. Very quickly, the audience is made aware that she has malign intentions. Despite this, she does not appear to have any clear motive. The audience might assume that she is wary of being invaded by Odysseus and his men, whose identity she is unaware of. Regardless, Homer wants the audience to view her with caution and to continuously remain aware that she might pose a risk to Odysseus and his men and prohibit them from reaching Ithaca.

Odysseus makes the trip to Circe’s house, and because he has received advice from Hermes, the messenger god, along the way, and warnings from Eurylochus, he is fully aware of these dangers. Upon entering Circe’s house, she tries the same trick on Odysseus that she did on the men who came before, but quickly realises that somehow, he is immune, and so immediately suspects divine intervention. She is bewildered, forced onto the back foot, and so assumes a welcoming and loving demeanour. She bathes Odysseus, washes his feet, feeds him, and sleeps with him. Odysseus requests that she release his men from their transformation into pigs; she feels pity for him, and agrees. The extent to which Circe is concerned about receiving divine punishment if she does not accede to Odysseus’ request is not made clear, but one can be sure that sympathy plays a major part as Odysseus and his men spend an entire year with Circe before she facilitates their removal. 

*The Magic Circle by John William Waterhouse, 1886 AD

These events reveal a great deal about Circe’s character. In many respects, she lives a life any other normal Greek woman might. She gathers herbs, possesses homely goods, and even weaves whilst singing, which Odysseus hears her doing as he approaches her house. In this sense, she is a familiar and inconspicuous Homeric character. One might even feel sorry for her for the solitary life that she lives. She has a clear sense of morality and feels compassion for others, which furthers this impression. Circe is moved by Odysseus’ account of his toils and seeks to make his life better once she finds out, going so far as to provide him hospitality for an extended period, a whole year.

Therefore, whilst Homer presents Circe as a character to be feared and regarded with great suspicion, he also endows her with a womanly grace and morality which makes the audience think twice about assigning to her the status of a villain. 

Another example of this dynamic is manifest in the character of Polyphemus, the Cyclops. Much of his behaviour toward Odysseus and his crew is deplorable, but when one examines the context, it tempers his otherwise tyrannical nature. The anger Polyphemus shows toward Odysseus for entering his cave and helping himself to his goods is understandable, particularly after Odysseus requests, after he and his crew’s indiscretions, that they be treated as guests should by Polyphemus. One feels that Polyphemus is somewhat justified in not behaving cordially toward him and showing resistance to Odysseus’ entreaties. Nevertheless, these caveats are no excuse for Polyphemus’ cannibalism and his other abhorrent acts later on in the book.

*Autumnal Cannibalism by Salvador Dali, 1936 AD

Despite this, it was the case that before Odysseus began causing trouble, Polyphemus was living a peaceful life in isolation. He exists as any shepherd might, tending his flock, milking them and taking great care to ensure they are happy. He gathers firewood, enjoys fine things like cheese and wine, and at certain points has a very likeable personality. The same sympathy that the audience might feel for Circe is felt in a similar way for Polyphemus. Living by oneself must be tricky, one wonders, even for a witch and a Cyclops.

*Herd of Sheep at Pasture by Aelbert Cuyp, 1650-1655 AD

Therefore, whilst Polyphemus’ reaction to the wrongs done to him by Odysseus are extremely severe, they are, to a degree, understandable. In Circe’s case, it was she who committed the first foul act. In Polyphemus’ case, the initial wrong was done to him, not by him. Homer makes it easy for the audience to feel sympathy for the way in which Polyphemus was decapitated by Odysseus, in which he lost his sight. Homer’s graphic description only enhances this feeling. 

*The Raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault, 1818-1819 AD

There exists an overwhelming and undeniable sense that in Odysseus’ interactions with Circe and particularly Polyphemus, the moral fault did not entirely belong to them. Their territory was infringed upon by a foreign group of people led by a liberty-taking Odysseus who they perceive as threats to their sovereignty and wellbeing. 

The emotional and moral complexity Homer endows his characters with serves to maintain narrative moderation and to narrow the divide between hero and villain, greatly enhancing the ways of thinking and living that his characters embody. 

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